5 Respect and Responsibility: How to complete a course or instructor evaluation
5 Respect and Responsibility: How to complete a course or instructor evaluation that truly reflects your learning experience
2019
Cascadia College COLL101 Team
Introduction
A key learning outcome in many COLL101 or College Success courses is to be able to demonstrate your agency and personal responsibility for learning. This responsibility for learning includes offering feedback from your perspective as a student. For example, throughout the academic term, you may be asked by your instructor for feedback about how things are going, what could be improved, and/or what is working; some instructors do this more than others. Most instructors will ask you to complete the college’s formal course or instructor evaluations by the end of an academic term. Typically, course or instructor evaluations are anonymous surveys composed of a series of demographic and other questions about students (i.e. why did you enroll in the course, etc.), how the course or instructor addressed the learning outcomes of the college, and two open-ended questions (which aspects of the class were most beneficial to your learning and what you recommend the instructor add or change in future sections of the class). Additional questions about the laboratory or online or hybrid nature of a class are also included, if applicable. Such surveys usually takes 10-15 minutes to complete and may be done on campus with pencil and paper, or online. Anonymous results of the evaluations are returned in an aggregate summary to the instructor after grades have been submitted at the end of the quarter.
Often, course or instructor evaluations are done in a rush at the end of the academic term, and students have little preparation for the responsibility of offering useful and appropriate feedback. Many students are overwhelmed and stressed towards the end of an academic term and may have trouble using constructive language or focusing on their experience over the entirety of the quarter when they complete their evaluations. As a result, the evaluation reports themselves are often not as useful for instructors or the institutions as they could be. This short reading addresses some possible misunderstandings and inexperience around course or instructor evaluations by explaining how such evaluations are used and reported, and some of the issues around course evaluations in regard to anonymity and bias. The reading ends with a practical list of recommendations for how you can make your course evaluations reflect the actual learning experience you have had.
How course evaluations are used
Unlike popular crowd-sourced tools for rating professors, colleges carefully develop their own unique and detailed course evaluations that ask about learning in various ways. These help colleges assess if students are learning and instructors get information about what works and what can be changed and improved in their future courses. At some colleges, course evaluations may also be used for evaluative purposes for emp