Instructors use your responses to improve teaching and course design.
Teaching and Learning Services interviewed instructors, Chairs, and Directors about their perspectives on student feedback from course evaluations. Excerpts from their interviews are provided below.
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Photo: Owen Egan |
鈥淚鈥檓 old enough to remember when students had to fight for the right to have course evaluations. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was a real struggle. Things were very hierarchical in those days. The thought that you could possibly make critical comments in any official way about the instructor or the course was inconceivable. Students won that right, and like any right, if it is not exercised it risks falling by the wayside.鈥� Elisabeth Gidengil |
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鈥淭he sharpest example of the usefulness of the evaluations is when I taught Islamic Civilizations, a 200-level survey course. Since I was not accustomed to teaching a class with such a large number of students, I didn鈥檛 quite know how to lecture straight rather than have back and forth discussions. I knew as I was going along that I wasn鈥檛 doing a very good job of it, but the evaluations gave me a much more specific formulation of the problems that students were having. For example, many found that the level of the readings was far too advanced, so the next time I taught that course, I made sure they had undergraduate-level readings. So that really, really helped and sure enough, the evaluations the next time around were far superior on that note.鈥� Prashant Keshavmurthy |
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Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
鈥淚 read every single comment from the students. I try to pick out or get a sense of what they鈥檙e trying to say. Then I think, how does that relate back to the course and how can I improve certain elements of the course? If those are things that students are liking, I am going to make sure that I continue doing this activity. I just try to look at what the constructive feedback is.鈥澨� "In our department, there are people who are in physical education, some are in kinesiology, some want to be doctors, some want to be physical therapists, some want to be educators... so from the course evaluations I realized my examples have to be quite a bit broader than what they were in the past. Now when I try to explain content using real world data or different examples, I try to look at the scope from children to adults across a variety of settings." Shane Sweet |
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鈥淎s Chair, I am hiring people, and student feedback definitely affects who I hire, who is doing well, and who has special problems. I will sit down with professors sometimes in order to discuss any problems that arose with students in their course evaluations to talk about ways that they can improve.鈥� John Galaty |
Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
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Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
鈥淏ased on student feedback, I revamped my entire course. This year, everything from how the course was structured, how I ran every lecture, the evaluations... completely changed. I got very good suggestions from the students like 鈥榠nstead of this, try this鈥� 鈥� and that鈥檚 exactly what I did. I tried different things and it went really well.鈥� 鈥淚 want a high response rate because I want a representative level of feedback. You always have certain people who don鈥檛 like certain things, so I鈥檓 encouraging participation as much as possible so I can hear the voices of all of the students. Not only those who hated or loved the course, but as many people as possible so that if I make a change, it鈥檚 representative of the comments. For me, the main incentive is really just getting high quality feedback.鈥� Sylvie Lambert |
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鈥淚 would say that students never know how they might touch a professor. Sometimes students might think that their feedback does not matter, that they don鈥檛 have to write anything because it鈥檚 not even read or taken into consideration. But I would argue that often times they鈥檙e wrong, because what students say can really touch a professor. The professor might think, 鈥榳ow this is a good comment,鈥� or 鈥榯his is something I鈥檝e been thinking about, and it鈥檚 true even if it鈥檚 hard to admit.鈥欌�� Francoise Filion |
Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
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Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
鈥淐ourse evaluations are very important to me and extremely useful, especially because of the comments and qualitative part. I really use the feedback to adapt my courses for the next year. I sit down, get the gist of the comments, and use it to re-design the course or tweak the course if needed. It usually helps me work on the alignment of my assignments and my objectives and see if there are any problems.鈥� Marjorie Aude Rabiau |
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鈥淪tudent feedback really influences how professors teach. And I think it becomes even more important today, because so much knowledge is available online and we need to really add value in the classroom. The way we do that is by listening to what students have to say about the course.鈥�
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Photo: Nadine Hennelly |
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Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
鈥淎s a professor you try to get students to understand that you actually do take their feedback seriously and you actually do read their comments, good or bad. These comments are useful because they鈥檙e the only direct feedback around. What other feedback do I have? This is the place where you can be negative and constructive and I will read that. And maybe students don鈥檛 believe that I read them or care, but they鈥檙e wrong on that.鈥� Christopher Ragan |
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鈥淐ourse evaluations really matter to me. They really matter especially when they tell me about something that didn鈥檛 work well and if I changed it, it could work better next year. Of course I really want to hear about that, because I want to make the course better 鈥� it鈥檚 really just as simple as that.鈥� Ian Gold |
Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
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Photo: Stephanie Fehertoi |
鈥淚 think most professors think very deeply about how we frame information. I鈥檝e never taught the same class twice; I always change things. Having feedback from the students about what is working and what is not working is the most valuable information that I can have when I am re-writing a course.鈥� 鈥淐ourse evaluations have alerted me to things I never would know due to other means. The kind of information that has been really helpful is if a majority of the students will say something is too hard. That is very, very important because that is usually not the kind of thing they want to mention in class. They鈥檇 usually prefer to mention that anonymously, which I completely respect.鈥� Tabitha Sparks |
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鈥淔irst and foremost, course evaluations are the only or main way I can determine whether a course needs to be changed. Without it, I鈥檓 going in blind.鈥� 鈥淐ourse evaluations are the major way I have of flagging either courses that are problematic or conferring that a course is going fairly well. So evaluations are a way of identifying courses that may need some kind of change and they provide fairly rich information about what needs to change.鈥� Nico Trocm茅 |
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"I read every single comment, and I read them more than once. Usually, I look at my course evaluations immediately when they are released, and then again before teaching the course the next year. The course evaluations - particularly the comments - provide invaluable suggestions for improvements. I was hired at 海角社区 in 2014 and taught my first course that year. In 2015, I completely revamped the course taking into account student feedback. This led to a drastic improvement in the delivery of the material and in student satisfaction the following year. It is crucial to me to obtain a representative sampling of the students in each course. The average response rates are only 30%. If you are a student reading this, please participate in the evaluations. Response rates above 90% are on my Christmas wishlist each year." Corinne Hoesli |
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"Evaluating what we do and how we do it is always helpful whether it is a self-evaluation or an evaluation by others. Knowing that we are evaluated pushes us to give the best of us and to keep improving our work. I read all the evaluations听several times. Student feedback helps me improving my course for next years and adapting it to the new generation of students." Rima Slim |
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