The votes are in
Last semester, Rice began a new system of course evaluations that would allow students to see their peer’s own comments. And the responses are in — en masse.
“We patterned a lot of this after Stanford and Yale,” Registrar David Tenney (Sid ‘87) said. “And we actually did a little better.”
Undergraduates responded with a 96 percent response rate, with 14,151 responses out of a potential 14,808. Only 4 percent of the responses were blank submissions, as students were just allowed to click through the surveys on the way to seeing their grades. And 50 percent of the responses had written comments, which are now viewable through ESTHER.
“That beats our written evals,” Tenney said. He also said that students were writing longer, more indepth responses. “People did this on their own time, people are doing them in the middle of the night.”
There was fear that the written comments would have to be censored due to attacks on professors or language. However, this has turned out not to be the case, with only 2 comments of 9,574 removed.
“We did a scan for certain bad words, and some of them are out there, but we did not block those,” Tenney said. “We do not want to be in the business of taking comments off.”
Overall, Tenney said he was very pleased with the results. However, that does not mean there are not little flaws.
Extreme spectification often occured within the individual responses to a course. For example, serveral students would write that a class was great, while another distinct group would write that it was terrible. This issue often arose in courses that were crosslisted.
“Sometimes you see that the people that are coming from the engineering department, they love it. But the people coming from the natural sciences bent didn’t like it as much,” Tenney said. “It’s funny where there’s such extremes.”
Another notable oddity was that courses with praiseworthy written evaluations had received poor ratings in the rest of the evaluation. For example, MECH 340 received a 4.29 for Workload, ranking it between somewhat heavier and much heaver than workload in other classes Rice offers. However, students’ written responses claim that it was a very easy and fun course. These discrepancies could be due to a misunderstanding of the ranking system, which has low numbers as good — assuming an easy workload is good — and high numbers as bad. Nevertheless, the data displayed are the results as students filled them out, flaws and all.
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