Campus Life

Teacher Evaluations Available on the Web

Students, who are constantly graded by professors, now have the opportunity to see how their professors were graded by other students.


Teacher evaluations from Spring 2002 are now available online for students to review at http://planning.usu.edu/p&a/CourseEval/FacEval.htm.

The evaluations give a score from one to six to each professor in two categories: the overall quality of the course and the teacher's effectiveness in teaching the subject matter. The Web site does not give a key for interpreting the numbers. So, Tina Murray, staff assistant for the Office of Analysis Assessment and Accreditation, said a score of six is excellent, a five is very good, four is good, three is fair, two is poor, and one is very poor.

Dusty Allen, a sophomore majoring in civil engineering, said he would be interested in knowing how his professors were rated so he can find good teachers in the future.

"In order to get a good teacher, you have to have an evaluation," he said.

Allen said he looks for "someone who makes the class easy to understand and teaches the class on a level that we can understand it."

Holly Anderson, a junior communications major, said she has asked friends who have taken certain classes what she has to do to get an "A" and how the teachers grade.

"It would be nice to go to the Internet to see what people who have taken the class thought of the teacher," Anderson said.

Michelle Meyer, a sophomore agribusiness major, said, "I think teacher evaluations are good, because it gives the students a chance to evaluate the teacher and say if they learned anything or not."

She said evaluations also help the deans to know which professors to keep around.

Anne Shifrer, a literature professor, said the scores "give you a sense about how students respond to a course."

Shifrer said it would be worth students' time to go online and look at the evaluations, but it might not be extremely helpful in choosing classes.

"I don't know that you can tell that much, because most instructors fall within the average range, the university norm," she said. "You could look for the especially high ones and probably find that's an exceptionally good teacher."

Students are asked at the end of every semester to fill out an evaluation sheet in each class. The analysis department publishes the scores on course quality and teacher effectiveness, and the information from the other questions and the comment section are sent to the individual departments for their own use.

Shifrer said the remarks made on evaluation sheets are most important to professors in evaluating their own performance.

"The comments are generally more useful than the numbers in terms of rethinking the course," she said. "If there's a kind of consensus, if a lot of students make the same comment, then a professor would work on those."

Some students don't fill out the evaluations, because they think it is not important and the comments are not applied, Shifrer said. She said she disagrees, but the evaluations "could become more useful than they are" if students would take the time to thoughtfully fill out the forms.

"I think they do have an impact and the students' voices are heard, especially if the students bother to write comments and are detailed and articulate and don't seem to be just complaining but, rather, offering constructive suggestions," she said. "Those kinds of evaluations get listened to more."

Shifrer said she encourages students to make detailed, constructive comments about ways they think their classes could have provided a better learning experience. That way, things can change.


By Roy Burton, royburton@cc.usu.edu


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