Participation on student evaluations has remained around only 40 percent, leaving a significantly small amount of feedback for faculty to receive at the end of each semester.
This low response rate has remained low ever since the evaluations were switched from paper to an online format. According to Kim Wingo, the administrative assistant for Academic Affairs, student response rates were 70-79 percent when the evaluations were distributed on paper.
The switch to the online format began the fall semester of 2012 and created an easier process for university officials to keep track of the data. When the format was on paper, there were around 20,000 forms which took about two weeks to scan, according to Wingo.
Now that the evaluations are distributed online, students are more likely to forget or ignore them.
“I think it’s up to the students to respond, and I think the students, as an overall basis…(that) either have great positive experiences or really, really bad experiences, are the ones that respond,” said Wingo.
During the faculty senate meeting on Thursday, faculty discussed the issue of the low response rate from students. Many ideas were suggested as to how to possibly fix the issue, including requiring it to be done as part of a grade.
“I think students should feel like they have the option to do it. I wish more students would participate because if it’s 40 percent, and that’s an average, so if one class only has five percent (of student evaluation feedback), that faculty member doesn’t really have enough...basis to really show how they’re doing in a class,” Wingo said. “Five percent is just not enough students.”
Wingo said that the university has tried several options to try to encourage students to fill out the evaluations.
“We’ve tried different options. We’ve tried gift cards, appliances....I think students are more grade-driven and class-driven than incentive-driven...and I don’t know if tying it to a grade...would make a difference,” said Wingo.
According to Dr. Sarah Porter, the chair of faculty senate and an associate professor of chemistry, the senate will look at the methods which professors use to encourage students to fill out evaluations both this semester and next, and will determine at the end of the spring semester which methods resulted in the highest amount of feedback from students.
“The main purpose (of the evaluations) is to give faculty feedback so we can...improve our courses, and know what works and what doesn’t work. The faculty themselves use it as a way to improve on our teaching. They’re also used as a measure of teaching effectiveness, which we’re required to evaluate for our accreditation. So our accreditation requires us to demonstrate effectiveness in teaching and one of the ways we can do that is by collecting feedback from students,” said Porter.
The evaluations are also used for evaluating faculty for tenure and promotion. However, this process is up to individual departments on how to use the evaluations for that purpose.
The students’ evaluations consist of 16 questions, and one section for comments. Wingo said that many students have shown concern over whether or not the evaluations are anonymous.
The evaluations are anonymous “...unless you reference a specific instance that is specific to you in your comments,” said Wingo.
One of the benefits of having the student evaluations online instead of paper is that professors are unable to recognize handwriting like was possible when paper evaluations were provided.
“Faculty members cannot see any comments until after all grades have been turned in and closed out….there’s a good week and a half, two weeks, between when grades are due and when I release the results to the faculty. So they cannot see anything but their (class) percentage rate throughout the process,” said Wingo.
Students are encouraged to turn in student evaluations to not only help faculty, but provide advice for a better learning experience for future classes and students.
“I think we’ll just have to try a few different things and see what happens. I really don’t know if there’s an answer to it. Even when we did paper and pencil (evaluations), there was never a 100 percent response rate,” said Porter.
Student evaluations should be sent out next week for this semester and will be available to be sent in for two weeks.
