Ellington

How students grade their professors at the end of every quarter may change, and the Faculty Council on Teaching and Learning wants students to have a say in how the new process will work.

The Office of Educational Assessment (OEA) is looking into altering how course evaluations are proctored and how the data they produce are made available to students.

Nana Lowell, director of the OEA, recently presented the possible changes to the Instructional Assessment System (IAS) at a Faculty Council about Teaching and Learning meeting. The changes were prompted by requests from students and faculty for more online course evaluations and better access to the database that lists the results.

Jed Bradley, ASUW director of faculty, administrative and academic affairs, said the Faculty Council wanted student input on the issue, so Bradley will be arranging a student focus group to gather opinion about potential improvements that could be made to the system.

The student focus group will meet twice this quarter. The first meeting will collect initial student feedback. The focus-group students will then disperse to gather more opinions from their peers to bring to the second meeting. The focus group will write recommendations and offer them to the OEA, who will then decide how to improve students’ one opportunity to grade their teacher.

Lowell said that students are asked to fill out the course evaluations at the end of every quarter and their input is of interest to the OEA.

However, not everyone is looking for a change to the system. Sophomore Sean Anderson, who regularly fills out course evaluations, said that he likes the evaluations as they currently are because they “empower the students” by giving them an easy way to give opinions about the courses they’re taking. He said that he thought an argument for moving them online would be saving class time but that it would probably change how students respond.

“If [the evaluations] were online, people wouldn’t take it as seriously,” Anderson said. “The context would be different.”

Many believe that an online system would be better than how the evaluations currently operate, and Lowell said that the office has received numerous requests for online access.

“The two main changes that we’re seeing are enabling online course evaluations in some departments where that’s possible and improving the access to information for students and faculty,” Lowell said.

Despite a high demand for evaluations to make the change from paper to computer, Lowell said that the changes OEA has planned would not result in online evaluations for every course.

“We’re not planning to conduct online evaluations in general,” Lowell said. “Online evaluations would be the exception, rather than the rule.”

She said that online evaluations would be preferable in departments where the online evaluations could still be conducted in class.

“For example, the law school requires students to bring laptops to class, so they would be able to do the evaluations in class,” Lowell said. “That’s when we’re able to get good response rates: when students are in class.”

Lowell said the main problem with online evaluations now is that they don’t produce a high response rate. Lowell said that when the evaluations have a low student participation, there isn’t enough information for departments or the administration to base decisions on.

Lowell said that course evaluations are used for three purposes: to help instructors improve their teaching, to help departments make decisions about promotion and tenure, and to help students choose their courses.

“There are some very specific items on the form, which have to do with how the class is taught,” Lowell said. “Those items help to give information to the instructors about improvements that can be made in their teaching.”

Lowell said course evaluations are taken very seriously, especially when some departments use their results to help inform them for tenure and promotion decisions.

Despite the fact that the evaluations are not mandatory, Lowell said that student response is high when they’re conducted in class.

Along with considering the addition of more online evaluations, Lowell hopes to improve the information provided in the online course-evaluation catalog. OEA publishes the data from evaluations online in a course-evaluation catalog, so students can review them when they’re choosing classes.

She said the course-evaluation catalog was originally created at the request of ASUW. The IAS was established in 1999 and has been used since then to collect and summarize student ratings of instruction. It currently is used in more than 9,000 courses annually at the UW.

“It’s something we created at the request of the students,” Lowell said. “[This was done] to provide better data than some of the other websites students can look at. In some of the online ratings, you’ll often get only three or four students rating a professor.”

Lowell said such ratings don’t really evaluate the course because they only represent the opinions of a few students who usually have either very positive or very negative responses.

“You don’t get a balanced evaluation of faculty,” Lowell said, who also said that in the IAS database the results are more balanced because a lot of students respond to each survey posted.

The improvements would include a clearer presentation of the evaluation data, along with updating the catelog with new course information.

To help update a system that’s more than two decades old, Bradley said he’ll put together a focus group in the upcoming weeks, and they will all meet at a date to be determined.

Reach reporter Sarah Schweppe at news@dailyuw.com.