Although Ohio University colleges have thrown out paper course evaluations for efficiency purposes, online evaluations do not guarantee high response rates.
Since OU converted to online evaluations, faculty members have been hoping to receive a similar amount of responses they received in the past to inform college deans of their performance.
“(Lower response rate) hasn’t really been an issue for us because until recently when they were done on paper they were literally handed out to everyone in class,” said Elizabeth Sayrs, chairwoman of Faculty Senate.
Getting students to complete course evaluations is the instructor’s responsibility, and getting accurate responses helps instructors review their own performance, said Katherine Jellison, chair of the history department.
The responses are collected by each department administrator and sent to the evaluated instructor, Jellison said.
“The faculty are responsible for reading the evaluation feedback,” Jellison said. “I would suspect some do and some don’t.”
Stephen Bergmeier, chair of the chemistry department, said course evaluation responses have remained about the same in his department between paper and online responses, but lab classes often require more detailed responses in comment sections.
“The questions are probably as effective as they can be, (but) it sometimes becomes a little difficult when they’re evaluating a lab,” Bergmeier said.
However, the influence of course evaluations does not stop there. Course evaluations are then sent to a peer evaluation committee, which reads through all the evaluations in the department.
What the committee does with the evaluations depends on the department, Jellison said, but the history department then uses those evaluations to inform a summary of the performance of history instructors.
No matter the department, course evaluations are one of the main ways a dean evaluates a professor’s performance in consideration for a raise, promotion or tenure evaluation, said Robert Frank, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“When there’s feedback that there’s something amiss, it’s taken very seriously,” Frank said.
Some faculty, alternatively, receive inaccurate response from students that could reflect negatively on their performance.
“It tells us more about the person who did the evaluation than the person being evaluated,” Jellison said.
If a faculty member receives a response they don’t believe is fair, Jellison said she encourages the person to talk to her.
Student response rates to course evaluations was one of the main topics during December’s Faculty Senate meeting, Sayrs said.
In response to the decreased responses, the Provost’s Office is looking into creating a position to help faculty members increase their evaluation response rates, Sayrs said.
“I think it’s really about how you share with all the faculty who need it how to improve their responses,” Sayrs said.
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