From the Archives: On Evaluations

An essential component of most university courses is the evaluation of both students (often in the form of oral or written feedback and/or grades) and of instructors (in midterm or final course evaluations).

Midterm Evaluations
George’s reflective questions for a mid-semester self-evaluation are still important (perhaps even more important) as we head into November.

If you’re on a quarter system rather than a semester system, then you might still be at a midway point in your course. Billie’s post about having students evaluate your course at mid-term includes links to some useful resources. We also had some reader discussions earlier this fall about giving mid-semester course evaluations.

Giving Final Course Evaluations
If you’re on a semester calendar, then pretty soon the envelopes of course evaluation forms will be delivered. Here are some great posts from the archives that can help you make the most of the evaluation experience:

• Jason considers When to Give’Em, and When to Read ‘Em
• Brian recommends writing your own questions that are specific to your course in Getting the Most out of Your Evaluations
• George suggests asking a colleague to give you feedback on your teaching as a peer evaluation
• George started a lively conversation about how to improve the quality of the feedback you receive from students

Benefiting from Final Course Evaluations

• Mark starts a rousing discussion about when is the best time to read course evaluations, whether right away or when you’re going to teach the same course again
• Jason considers how best to work with numeric evaluation data
• Heather discusses what to do When Student Evaluations are Just Plain Wrong
• Jason offers five useful things to do with evaluations so as to make the most of them for the job market, promotion, or future course development.
• Brian wrote about Mark’s experiment in making teaching evaluations public.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by flickr user MforMarcus]