While teaching evaluations are effective, we need more than one way to evaluate teaching effectiveness. We may want to require faculty to submit teaching portfolios that include syllabi, exams, as well as other instructional materials when they are being evaluated for promotion, tenure and post-tenure reviews as well as have chairs observe faculty lectures. We should also require that all faculty submit teaching statements as part of their post-tenure reviews.

Definitions/examples should be provided for each question. For example, what does it mean to "present material clearly". Does that mean the professor doesn't have an accent? Does it mean you can read his/her writing? An illustration is helpful and standardizes the range of responses, or at least tries to. Some questions may not need it, but others, like "helpfulness outside of class" beg for it!

I have been struck by the often extreme disparity between the tone of written comments and the numerical evaluations.

More details on teaching methods might be asked, but I don't see a principle problems. The evaluation is quite effectuve.

De-emphasize numerical scores.

i think that the evaluation forms are fine. But departments do not always use them effectively to improve instructors' teaching. I have seen colleagues get the same critical comments year after year, and nothing happens. It is just very difficult to confront colleagues with defficineces in their teaching, and to make them more accountable for addressing the obvious (i.e. recurrent and consistent) shortcomings. So many chairs or older colleagues do not do it.

I really don't know, other than trying to find some way for faculty to take some of the comments seriously, while letting go of the unrealistic ones and not getting punished for that.

Include evaluations of laboratory work.

I think that some of the specific questions are very helpful- whether written comments on graded work were useful, whether the course got the students to think further etc. The problem is that sometimes students rate a course or professor poorly if the grading was too hard or for other irrelevant reasons.

I think they're basically pretty good. Some of the numeric questions don't necessarily apply to every class, i.e., how much "critical thinking" is relevant to a class devoted to teaching music fundamentals? But there's plenty of information for faculty to respond to. I like having both the numeric and written sections. Answers can be stunningly diverse at time, but reading a whole stack can usually turn up some useful insights.

Eliminate the pseudoscientific numerical evaluations; or if not, FORBID the untrained administrators (e.g., Doug) from using the numbers in the ways they now use them, which are a combination of Magical Thinking and top-down Management Pseudoscience. Take the narrative parts of the evaluation seriously, rather than (as is *incontestibly* the practice now) cherrypicking them to find BAD comments, while studiously avoiding GOOD comments. Distinguish clearly between summative and formative evaluation, and make the distinction clear to the students, the faculty, and the administrators. Make very clear to the students the fact that they can, by carelessness or unbased hostility, cost the faculty literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of salary over a career: although this may bring out viciousness in some students, I think it more likely to foster carefulness and considered thought in the majority. Forget the entire enterprise of "Univesity Wide" teaching evaluation, and return to the days when each department, in its wisdom, did its own evaluations and actually learned something from them.

If we receive the results earlier we can make adjustments prior to creating the syllabus and ordering books for the coming year.

Different questions Link them to students' actual grades so everybody knows whether the evaluations came from studentd doing well or poorly in the class

perhaps vary the type of evaluation form that is given for lower level and upper level courses give faculty member information on the relationship between scaled items and the grades students receive in the course/or the average grade given in the course add a couple questions that the faculty member or the department can choose to add do evaluations for a sample of courses rather than all courses; students get worn down by the repetitive process, and faculty members often are overly anxious about the evaluation process in relation to their pedagogy

A system that is oriented towards assessing faculty performance relying heavily on teaching evaluation forms is somewhat dangerous. Particularly, the enormous emphasis placed just on one category--overall effectiveness of the instructor--is somewhat problematic. One is not really clear what exactly is effectiveness is and how to measure it. Although Clark Students are generally astute in some observations, many do not understand the amount of effort that goes into class preparations, organization of class lectures, and running websites without TA help. Hence, many of them make broad comments, such as the instructor is not organized, which does not reflect an instructor's true effort and potential or does it really the instructor what to do. We also have to come up with a measure to capture the relationship between ability to acquire easy grades and the student's assessment of that particular instructor. I still think it is a good way of collecting information from students and it also keeps the instructor honest. But, at the same time there are problems with a course that is entirely driven by student interest and concerns. Faculty should allow their larger pedagogical goals drive the class and its organizational structure.

no idea.

There are about 10 questions on the evaluation, but the faculty is rated only on one question: overall effectiveness. What is the point of asking 10 questions if at the end only one is relevant? Overall effectiveness should really be the average of all question. Teaching evaluations don't distinguish between advanced, intermediate and beginner courses, although the score is very much influenced by students' overall experience at Clark. There should be some factor attached to the courses in each category to make them more comparable. Students need to be informed about the seriousness and consequences of evaluations. Everybody should be encouraged to write comments, not just complaints.

Redo them five years after stuedsents tkae the course; then ten.

Individualized by department, so that questions related to projects, labs, studio work, etc. could be better accommodated.

Student run evaluations have always been more interesting and perhaps useful than those developed and run by the institutions. If we must stick with the institutional format, there should be some way of measuring the thoughtfulness of student responses and the relationship between those responses and the grade for the course, if any.

It would be more effective if they were given at the end of the course, rather than several weeks before the semester ends. Probably what would be a great addition, is that in addition to the semester-end eval., do another one 6 months later. In reality, I think the evaluations are student satisfaction surveys, and not necessarily a measure of the effectiveness of a teacher or the extent of student learning.

Keep it as it is. Not perfect, but good enough.

(1) ask more specific questions that are relating to the specific teaching goals of the specific coursess (2) use focus groups or moderated group discussions (3) educate students about the relevance of these evaluations

Results should come back faster. Earlier in the semester.

Since I teach in a humanities field, I always wish there was a question specifically asking students to evaluate the reading selections for the class - whether they found them engaging, relevant, which were most valuable. Otherwise, the combination of number scores and written comments is fairly helpful.

Focus on the written comments. Add the grade students expect in the course.

Find a way to evaluate teaching rather than popularity. Find a way to see if there is a connection between comments and students' grades in the course.

Clarify with students and faculty exactly what the role of course evaluations is.

Clark should get rid of teching evaluations.

This is my first semester here at Clark so I don't have any specific thoughts on how to improve it yet.

Publish them for students ?

Encourage more use of questions submitted by the instructor.

Drop all numerical ratings. They are never analyzed the way they should be. Each question gets a mean and a standard deviation. That's not enough analysis. There should be a deep analysis. For instance, how do the responses on the various questions correlate, within a course, across courses?

I don't know of any specific changes to make evaluation more effective, except to have more essay responses.

Prepare a standarized form to evaluate laboratories as well as lectures

On-line evauluations.

Consider individual students' motivation re higher education as part of the context in which to interpret the results

We should replace them with instruments that have been tested and subject to research. Several of these are available from reputable companies. But if we keep the current evaluations, the following changes should be made: (1) the student's expected grade should be included, and also correlations between expected grades and ratings of the instructor (2) the evaluations should belong to the professor (as in many other institutions); they should not belong to the university; (3) the evaluations should be written by the students to the professor, not to the university or administration; (4) the evaluations should ask students to report not so much on their 'satisfaction' (likes and dislikes) but on objective criteria and on how much they have learned.

I think the forms are reasonably good - no suggestions for improvement.

Different instructors have different types of goals and the questionnaire lacks the flexibility needed to measure different goals equally. A more flexible evaluation instrument would need more than a few revised questions, but would allow for instructor goals and department or instructor evidence on the attaining of these goals.

Have more focused questions to be answered in text rather than so much emphasis on numerical scores.

Make sure that questions are pertinent to all disciplines (e.g. the question about "qality of written comments about student work" isn't relevant to all courses. How about simply "quality of comments"?

Encourage more written comments. If those become part of the "evaluation culture," instructors would get a more specific yet more rounded sense of student response.

If students feel that they are relevant it should provide an incentive for them to give more detailed responses (this implies that I do not think that students think that they are relevant).

Let the students know who the audience is intended to be. Perhaps like journal reviews, one form could be intended for the chair and COP and another form could be feedback to the instructor.

I am not sure if student's can evaluate teaching in a meaningful manner. They can state if the professor is prepared, interesting, etc. But the impact of the course on the student's intellectual development etc. often can't be determined until years later

First of all, separate the two functions--evaluation for promotion, tenure and merit raises, versus feedback to professors. No one can can answer with both goals in mind. If the two were separated, then one could ask which goals they might achieve more effectively. Second would be to clarify the goals of the evaluations--to better select and/or motivate professors to become more popular? To provide helpful feedback? To permit an outlet for expressing dissatisfaction? Third problem is that course evaluations provide the illusion of a concern with teaching effectiveness, without much demonstrated validity. Research might, for example, see how ratings during undergraduate years correlate with opinions ten years later. Fourth, it would be good to explore the sources or ratings. A number of clever psychological studies have demonstrated that ratings obtained after only 15 minutes of the first class correlated very highly with ratings at the end of the semester. Even a 2 second sample correlates significantly. One suspects that physical attractiveness and perhaps a little glibness are the major determinants of the ratings.

Any reputable opinion sampling methodology will show you how Clark's forms are fatally flawed. Among other problems, the simplest guideline for entering data says you can not get results that are numerically more precise than the data entered. Whole numbers are entered on the Clark form; numbers w/ decimals are derived from the entries. Thus the form is fatally flawed, i.e., to be accurate the conclusions would have to be whole numbers and, of course, that would not serve ONE of the uses these are put to, i.e., used by the administration to set salarly and bonus amounts. Virtually every Clark faculty would get a 'B' which would be useless since the forms are used to discriminate among faculty. Student evaluations can be used diagnostically or evaluatively. The former is a legitimate use of the current form, i.e., a professor might learn what works and what doesn't. The latter is a bogus use, but that is the most salient use they are put to; evaluating at the dept. level, at the administrative level, at the level of the university personnel committee,i.e., the numbers help determine who gets tenured, who gets promoted, etc. All such uses are based on fatally flawed procedures............as I said, check on the most elementary opinion sampling methodology and you'll discover how Clark's form violates virtually every guideline. Check on how the forms are tallied and then applied in a manner that violates the most elementary rule on data gathering and summing. ETC. The ONLY LEGITIMATE USE OF THE FORMS IS DIAGNOSTIC; ALL OTHER USES ARE CHARADES THAT SERVE THE NEED FOR 'CONTROL' AND THE PRETENSE THAT USING NUMBERS MAKES SOMETHING MORE PRECISE AND 'SCIENTIFIC.' PLUS, WHAT WOULD WE DO IF WE STOPPED PRETENDING WE CAN MEASURE WITH OBJECTIVITY THE QUALITY OF TEACHING?!

1. Ask the grade expected in the course. 2.Cut out all use of numbvers, or AT LEAST only total each of the five grades given in a class for each question separately: DO NOT provide means, which are all the idiot administrators look at. Return to students fir revaluations of a course five years later--this can be done with evaluations at the extremes.

They seem ok as is. i am sure more information on what is meant by effectiveness of the instructor, etc. would be helpful, but that might make the evaluation process a bit too long.

Given the limits of this kind of procedure, I think the current system is adequate. We get a range of responses from students -- they get a chance to rank aspects of the experience, as well as to comment open-endedly. The teaching evaluation need not be a forum for serious in-depth problems in any case -- that would come up in other ways. I think faculty read them, and that's the point, isn't it? When do we get to rank the students? I think for administrative review that a note from the faculty member providing context about the student group is in order.

Ask more questions about what the course means to the student. Would they tell others to take it? why or why not? Ask about what worked best and least, what to repeat or leave out from their perspective. CHANGE THE WORDING "EFFECTIVENESS of INSTRUCTOR". It's very male, very business-oriented and certainly not what many of us do best...seeming "effective"... How about how much did this course influence your personal and professional development? What did this person contribute to your personal, intellectual and professional development?

Try to get at whether or not the students actually learned something in the course. Isn't that what we are supposed to be about?

The teacher's perspective needs to be taken into account.

Include questions that reflect the fact that, ultimately, students are responsible for their own learning and not simply passive listeners. Have questions that evaluate their engagement (or disengagement) with the course so that their comments on the course could be put into context.

I--Separate the two main functions of evaluations: (1) to make conclusions about people for various purposes (salary, personnel actions, etc) and (2) to be a tool for improving teaching. Research shows that mixing so-called "summative" and "formative" evaluation in one instrument makes the tool less helpful for both purposes. II--Give instructors an opportunity to rate each course. Long term teachers know that the same course can be very different with different students, but we have no way of making that perspective part of the record, as a context for reading student responses to us.

Undergrads do not trust nor do they respect the system-- that profs do not seethe evals before grades-- students feel sheepish about telling their true feelings about us, i.e. they say "s/he is so knowledgable about the subject" but donot add " but s/he cannot teach it." They see that bad profesors, i.e. those who cannot teach teach the same subject matter next year in the same way with the same syllbi, etc. Students discuss us professor, they ask about us, etc. ; they know that the evaluations are basically useless due to tenure--students know that tenured profs are untouchable. Student enjoy part-time people who are energetica nd devoted to their teaching or junior faculty who are trying to get tenure-- students understand the power/ambitions of pre-tenure professor.

Allow students who are absent on the day of the evaluation to fill one out later.

I am concerned that students will not complete the on-line evaluations and that the response rate will decline.

Problems: A self-selected group of students will use it. That means most likely you will get students who strongly like the course/instructor or those who really hate course/instructor. You won't get a sense of the mean. Also in the short term, there is nothing to compare it to b/c the past format won't be a valid comparison for the reason of selectivity that I just stated. Benfits: Might facilitate speedy return to professors (once grades are in of course) whereas now we have to wait usually a couple of months or more before seeing them. Might make it easier to save and review the written comments about our courses.

I don't see principle problems.

Response rate.

response rate will be low and as a result the data will be skewed. I thinke that we should allow students who miss the calss during which evaluations are conducted to complete them on-line, but we should not replace the current system with elecronic one.

I don't see any problems with online evaluations. Maybe students would be less likely to fill them out b/c they are not in class? Maybe students would be more likely to share their comments with each other? I don't think these problems are very significant, though.

My course evaluations were done last semester electronically and I found this a welcome improvement. No class time was lost in the process. Unfortunately, it took a very long time for the results to be communicated to me. Considerably longer than for those faculty who were evaluated by the paper form method. Why this was so slow is a mytery.

I worry that people will not take much time to fill them out. When they are completed in class, there is an expectation that they have all of the time they need. If it cuts into their private time though, they may be less thoughtful in their responses.

If students would fill them out, then that's great. My main concern would be that, given no specific "evaluation time" where everyone sits there with a pencil, most students simply wouldn't bother. On the flip side, students who for some reason missed class on the Evaluation day could still fill one out. Also, the non-real time aspect COULD mean that students think out their comments more carefully. Or not.

No opinion.

Too cumbersome to view the results of the perhaps 100 evaluations.

Benefit is to save class time and possibly to give students more time to reflect on their answers

may lead to a lower response rate over time may produce more wild answers or fewer qualitative comments because the process is completely individual rather than in the classroom context

I am not sure about this system; I think the biggest drawback of this system is that lacks the structure and immediacy of in-class evaluation in which students assess faculty in a captive setting without any collaboration. However, in a non-captive setting I fear that the response rate will be really low.

(1) if the student does it privately, we lose the group effect (filling them out as a group) that (hopefully) urges the student to take up a more objective approach to the quality of the class rather than a subjective one. (2) Students might not get around to it until they are either spurned on either by a particularly good experience or bad one with the class and instructor.

Benefit: 1) no class time is wasted; 2) they do not need to be anonymous (at least the chair could find additional information). Problem: 1) student participation; 2) reinforcement of individual evaluations rather than have a team effort by the students.

Perhaps too casual

Assurance that each student only can submit one evaluation per course and only for courses in which they are registered.

Rate of return and thoughtfulness of responses.

I don't know enough about how it would be administered online, would it somehow happen in class? I would worry students wouldn't do it if it wasn't in class. A benefit of online is that it would make it faster to process the evaluations.

Benefits, saves class time. Costs, not all students may fill one out since it is at 'their' convenience. I expect that students at extremes (especially negative extremes) will take the opportunity to fill them out.

(1) problem: becoming more detached and impersonal (2) benefit: more efficient (3) if done together with focus groups (triangulation) I think it would be a good idea

there's no way to get all students to participate. Everybody procrastinates.

The only potential problem I could forsee for online evaluations is getting a sufficient sample. When the evals are done in class, you are guaranteed a good percentage of answers. With too few responses, the evals become pointless.

If they are completed within a set, short time frame, I see few problems. I'm very curious to see if the number of evaluations filled will be reduced.

Students who don't like working on computers may not evaluate.

Benefits: More time to be reflective Problems: Might be more likely to fill out the form when feeling strong emotion.

None of us want on line evaluations - its making a complicated thing more complecated.

Probably the biggest problem would be ensuring that students actually compelte the evaluation. Doing it in class ensures participation but if it was outside of class some students would probably not get around to doing it.

They represent only a portion of the quality of the teaching. Since they are practically the only information on teaching for most instructors they get too much attention.

In class evaluations take too much of the valuable course time.

I fear they might invite fraud, or multiple submissions from disgruntled students.

I think that only students who bother to come to class should get the right to evaluate their faculty. I would strongly oppose online evaluations.

Few will take the time to do it, and those who do will most likely be the ones who wish to complain rather than those who have a more balanced evaluation.

Benefits: saves time in class, saves secretary and work study students from coordinating evaluations in various courses on different days, ensures confidentiality and no tampering with paper evaluations, and easy for students to do. Typed up comments from on-line responses uch easier to read and usethan lots of forms with hand-written comments.

Not sensitive to individual differences in students motives, needs, reasons to take course

Online evaluations have the benefit of convenience. That's all that I can see.

I'm concerned that students won't take the online evaluations as seriously, and that we'd get only a selected minority of students responding - I also like getting responses from students who bother attending class.

By having the evaluations in class, we have a better chance to filter out the students who do not attend regularly.

I worry about hacking and about collusion -- students working together to attack a faculty member they don't like or to hype a faculty member they do.

A benefit is that it wouldn't have to be administered during class time and that all students could particpate (now particpation is dependent on attendence on the day evaluations are given). A potential problem is lack of security/privacy.

Written comments would, I fear, become less prevelant; there is advantage in taking the 15 or so minutes during a class session to have students say what they can. On-line participation would not, I think, generate the substantive response I, for one, need and want.

As the experiments with online voting show, people have an incentive to do something if they see others doing it and know that others see them doing it (online voting leads to a fall in voter participation). That is, even if you make online evaluations mandatory (by putting a hold on registration for example), the social effect of sitting in a room with others evaluating professors is lost (the benefit may be that students with serious opinions are the only ones who will participate).

I'm concerned that students wouldn't complete online evaluations. They are simply easier to ignore.

Only advantage is that it would not waste class time. It might result in a biased sample since only students that feel it is worthwhile will participate.

Don't see any unique to online format

There is less reason to take them seriously and thus give the thoughtful response. The ritual of a classroom setting for the evaluations tends, I believe, to endow the process with more gravitas. The benefits seem to me few; not disrupt class time, easier to scan and sum, perhaps get more students in the class to do the forms though those who can't be bothered to show up for class on pre-announced evaluation day, don't...generally....seem the most helpful source for info on the course.

The faculty will not allow them unless access is restricted.

I don't see any problems. The benefits would be faster and easier access to evaluations.

I think the relative dignity of doing them in class together probably gives us a more serious response from students.

ON line is fine but not if generally available. Only if students grades are also open... If ON line it would also be important to make plenty of room for comments.

Student mischief.

It is imperative that students fill out the evaluations in the classroom in a public setting among their peers. The ability to complete the evaluations in a non-formal setting has the potential to enable students to take the evaluation process less seriously.

The process is dehumanized enough as it is, with the emhpasis on multiple-choice, quantitative assessment. Online evaluations would only excerbate the problem and introduce the possibility for collaboration among students.

Benefits would be that we can save class time at the end of the semester (which, in my case, is when I need most the 20 mns alloted for evaluations). However, I am not sure students would take the evaluation process seriously or fill them in at all if online.

I think that on-line evaluations de-contextualize the process and remove some of its seriousness. That is a problem. On the other hand, it might increase participation, and it would mean that evaluations could be done AFTER a course was completed and the student could have an idea about the whole.

Benefits: Students could filled them out in their free time; woudlhave ample time to do so; coud think about it more; woudl feel more free to share their ideas. Problems: Woudlthey do it by a certain date?

Assuming that security can be ensured and that each student votes no more than once then the only problem I see is in ensuring participation. Otherwise I like the idea.

My "benefits" above covers that for faculty. For students, they can get some evaluative measures for courses they might be thinking about taking but don't know very much about.

It increases competion and might have negative impacts on the social atmosphere--like as all competition has.

Just because students respond to the questions and write comments, they mean that they are valid. I had one student write a horrible thing on my ratemyprofessor.com because of the grade he received. I don't think we achieve better education by publicizing anything and everything.

This is a very personal type of data. Some students are ruthless in their criticism and careless in their choice of words. Making it public would violate a person's right to privacy. I am straongly against it.

I think that transparency is good. While the occasional student may make inappropriate comments, these could be filtered out. Plus, I believe that most students take evaluations seriously. The benefits would be increased accountability for faculty -- if one of us consistently gets poor marks, then we should know that and try to change it.

I see no problems whatsoever.

a. Benefits- I think that students can avoid poor quality courses by reading the overall evaluations first. b. Problems- I worry that students will look for "easy" classes and avoid more challenging ones.

Frazzled, defensive professors! Evaluations are meant to be a teaching tool for professors, helping them to iron out problems and hone strengths. If you go public, then disgruntled students suddenly wield great power -- they can flame away and know that students and parents will see it. I don't think this creates a very healthy teaching environment. Of course, there do exist online sites where this situation already exists, but participation in them is fairly patchy.

Groupthink.

The benefit is that student's would have an opportunity to chose a professor they feel will be worthwhile to take a course from. For faculty it is a way to identify colleagues that might be doing something interesting in the classroom that others could use or that might be able to give assistance with a particular teaching situation.

Students might be unduly influenced by them, come to a course with prejudices, not realize that students with different learning styles might have very different opinions of the same course.

Faculty evaluations are currently available to all department chairs and to the faculty members on the Committee on Personnel for every major personnel action. This is sufficient. We don't send out student grades to all faculty members, and we shouldn't send out the evaluations either. I see no reason why students would need them. Teaching is taken seriously by the faculty at Clark, and evaluations are examined carefully. Again, student grades are not broadcast to faculty, and I do not believe that faculty evaluations should be broadcast to students.

I am not quite sure about this yet. One has to think more about it. There is a danger is students steering towards faculty who get better ratings or receive more positive comments. Already we have websites like ratemyprofessors.com, which ranks faculty on hotness, boring lectures, easy grader, etc. I fear this will lead to an inane competition on likeability and commercialize and corporatize the process of student evaluations.

the evaluations aren't a goddamn popularity contest; this treats them this way. Students will use evaluations to do decide what professors to avoid, perhaps very unfairly. students are not the final arbitors of the quality of a professor.

We get the scores by department and can compare our score to those. I have no interest, no time and no need to read evaluations of my collegues. Evaluations already bacame a potential tool for harassement, they should not become a tool for public humiliation. Evaluations are usefull only to junior faculty, who are working on improving their teaching. They definitely don't need to be humiliated. Evalutaions are anonimous. Sometimes the instructor ends up with a bad commment from a student who has problems at Clark in general, or even has emotional problems. This has never been taken into account. Some students mark accedentally the wrong field and the instructor gets a bad rating. I have seen all this during my years at Clark. In every case the instructor is always the looser. There is no need for students to see evaluations. They need to come to class with an open mind and a positive attitude. Maybe some classes are chosen because of the instructor, but the majority of classes for a major are chosen because of the requirements and not because of professors. How will making evaluaions public affect admissions?

Embarassing. But accountability often is.

Too easy for campaigns by students, faculty, or administration to punish faculty with perceived weaknesses, even while they may be using the feedback from the evaluations to improve their teaching from the student point of view. Worse is the increased perception by everyone, since this is the only kind of evaluation that would be publicized, that student evaluations are the only valid measure of a faculty member's teaching. There are actually many other measures that may get at much deeper levels of the value of a faculty member's teaching. In the final analysis, it's what the students learn that counts, and that may not be fully understood until years later. All in all, it may not be a great idea to post this information -- too easy to over-rate its meaning.

Making them public should provide for more interest and perhaps, make them more useful. They are already used in personnel cases, and their public viewing may provide an alternate means of evaluating the evaluations.

I would be careful on how to make the evaluations available to students and faculty. It might be good for students to have an additional bit of information when choosing classes.

Evaluations should be part of a continuous improvement effort. To have them publicly available may not truly help in that effort. The students will get to easily know which classes/instructors have gotten lower evaluations. But, I don't think they truly represent how much students have learned.

(1) if students' names are public I would have no problem; but keeping the students' comments anonymous and publicizing names of instructors opens up to abuse

Students need a way to know something about professors before enrolling in the course and being too late to withdraw the course.

I do not think evals should be made available to students and other faculty (although I know some schools do this). Evaluations express certain aspects of the classroom environment, but they do not capture it all; it means that students would be shopping for a teacher based on partial information. I am less opposed to fellow faculty seeing evals than I am to students seeing them.

I think the most serious problem would be a potential conflict with respect to confidentiality. That is, if these evaluations are indeed used to make personnel decisions, then they should not be available to the public. If they are NOT used to make personnel decisions, there should be no problem.

Students will read one another's comments and may be incited to be more negative because are joining with a group and publicly denouncing something (cf. the current riots in France, and the response of dissatisfied youth to media coverage!).

Benefits: ? Problems: I've had students write inappropriate comments that I really wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with others. For example, I've had students comment on my clothing, my sex appeal, etc.

Why should evaluations be made public - it is not anyone's business.

I think students deserve some data related to what previous students thought of the course. Not sure if all information from all the evaluations should be made available, or a summary.

None

This might encourage instructors to teach "to the evaluation" in order to gain popularity.

Students enjoy the right of privacy concerning their graded performance. Faculty should have similar rights. On the other hand, publicizing results might shame some lazy faculty into working a little harder (but probably not).

I see no problems with making the numerical scores available, but the comments should probably not be widely shared.

I think that it is a reasonable thing to do. There is nothing like a little public disclosure to shape us up.

It is likely that what validity the evaluations have is not equal acreoss students, departments and courses.

Evaluations administered officially through the university should be written by students *for the professor* and should be the property of the professor, to be used at his/her discretion and as he/she sees fit. As at other institutions, students are free to do their own surveys and ratings. There are online sites already that do this.

I've seen a wide range of written comments from students - some helpful, but others that seemed quite unjustified. I don't mind having to sift through the whole set of comments to identify the student concensus on the class, but I'd worry about having the occasional bizarrely negative comment being read by a wide audience (presumably without the context in which to judge the comment). I also worry that students might exaggerate/sensationalize their negative comments in an attempt to publicly hurt a professor they didn't like.

It would increase the likelihood that some professors would be labeled as unpopular. It would increase the demand for enrollment in "popular" professors' courses. Professors with poor evaluations would have less opportunity to respond.

I'm not sure this is a bad idea, but there would have to be some safeguards that the information wasn't used unfairly to smear a member of the faculty.

I think this would turn course selection into a popularity contest and compromises indivdual privacy.

I think they should all be in public domaine--but only some weeks after the end of the evaluative semester.

I see no problem as long as it relates to faculty past their rehire phase (i.e. younger professors may not benefit from it).

Public humiliation.

Administration and COP already take them too seriously. To a degree the student's assessment is determined on how well they are doing in the class and how interested they are in the subject. Students already know about classes by normal communication. To make them available to students would add little new information to their knowledge. Just look at which courses are popular or not. This indicates that students already obtain information prior to registration.

Of course, faculty might try to teach toward becoming popular, rather than being intellectually honest--surely not at Clark, but some places perhaps. Of course, to the extent that popularity ratings determine pay and grade, professors would be stupid not to work toward popularity.

Primarily, it is an issue of privacy........professor's privacy. Students have current access to an anonymous no guidelines evaluation service, rateyourprofessor.com. The content of that website also shows the problems of such a manner of collecting info. Benefits: if one could have confidence in the public data to function as a kind of Consumer Reports on Clark classes, then, I suppose, the student could be a more knowledgeable shopper. I suspect that word of mouth amongst students does that currently. Back in the early 70's some Clark students tried to run a student initiated and run opinion sample/evaluation of professors and courses. It lasted for a semester or two with not much success. That, at least, did not violate privacy issues.

The faculty will not allow it. Some years ago, on Steering Committee, I persuaded the Committee to publish the last year's grades by class. Great--one may even say bizarre--revelations, though the alphabet still had more than two letters in most (not all) departments. Major trauma to many and alas never repeated.

Problems - evaluations are subjective by nature and may not be the only way to tell if a course is good or useful to students - I remember getting to appreciate some courses well after I had taken them - so too much may be made of this contemporary response. Teaching for the evaluation form (like teaching for a test) may not improve the educational effectiveness of courses or instructors. Benefits - helps students choose among courses; may help to spur a slightly higer level of teaching success among the faculty.

This culture is obsessed with formalized measurement and assessment of every sort. Enough already. Let students talk with each other about their instructors, their courses, their experiences.

In a word, NO. Mine are gnerally good, sometimes excellent, but I am not interested in having the faculty eval.'s open if not admin and students too.

Slander.

As evaluations are performed to provide constructive comments to individual faculty about their teaching of a particular course, the evaluations should remain confidential for that instructor. The parallel is that the university does not make students' grades--the evaluation of their performance in a particular course--public, and neither should the evaluations of faculty. Just as students have different learning styles, so too do faculty have different teaching styles. I would worry that students would be swayed one way or the other from taking a particular course/faculty member based on an evaluation, and thus lose out on a fulfilling and exciting educational experience.

The potential for creating a popularity contest is overwhelming.

I feel that evaluations ought to be a personal matter. It should be up to individual professors to pass them on to colleagues or not. The chair would pick up on cases when professors are judged exceptionally good or poor by students, so I am not sure what the benefits of having evaluations available to students would be.

If evaluations are meant to help faculty improve (and I think that is there most important end), generally sharing the results will be counterproductive. Further, doing so increases the tendency to regard these numbers and comments as the decisive measure of quality of teaching and quality of education. That, I think, is a mistake. Like all of the recent ppress toward assessment and goal setting, it tends to substitute what can be measured for what is truly important. It s part of a general cultural trend toward "the reign of quantity."

NO problems- benefits only: Transparency as to teaching skills- very important to Make Clark a better university with top notch professors-- those who woudlnot measure up-- would have no enrollements and dead wood would/could be removed. Since we now are a corporation, we shoudl be run like one: ineffective profs should be let go-- students are our bread and it is a privilage to teach them-- plus they pay so much for mediocre education already.

I think we already place too much importance on these evaluations. Making them available will only increase their importance.