Some Syracuse University professors find that the process of student course evaluations are semi-helpful, but not necessarily an effective way of measuring student learning in a course.

In 2010, the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at SU developed an online student rating system to replace paper evaluations. By fall 2014, about 85 percent of student course evaluations were administered using OIRA’s online system. Each department or college owns its evaluation forms, as with the paper-and-pen versions, according to the OIRA website.

Not all of the departments use the same format for the evaluations, said Erin Mackie, a professor and chair of the English department at SU. She said the English department designs the questions for the undergraduate level so they are relevant to the courses offered. The forms have both multiple choice and short answer questions.

However, Mackie said, on the graduate level and in Master’s of Fine Arts workshops, most professors design their own evaluations, which tend to have more free response questions. These evaluations are not handled through OIRA. Rather, they are handled within the department, Mackie said.

Richard Breyer, a professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said the evaluations are “moderately beneficial.”

“They do give a peek into how students feel about the professor,” Breyer said.

Breyer said he finds that doing informal evaluations midsemester are more useful for him and his students because he has the chance to “course correct” if need be.

While informal evaluations are not required of him, Breyer said he does them because many times they lead to more dramatic change than the formal student evaluations at the end of the semester.

“I’m not getting a prescription of how the course could change, but simply having a discussion,” Breyer said.

Mackie said she has some reservations with the evaluations, not specifically within SU, but with their use nationally.

“They’re used to measure student learning, and they are not a measure of student learning,” Mackie said.

The evaluations measure the integrity of the teaching process, whether the professor arrives on time, if assignments were handed back and whether the material was taught in a way that could be understood, Mackie said.

From an administrative point of view, Mackie said that if there is a problem with an instructor, it will often come up on evaluations.

Mackie said she has found that the student evaluations tend to measure the grades that students expect, student satisfaction with their grades and whether they were content with the entertainment level of the course.

“Those student-centered concerns tend to color and distort the evaluations and make them unusable more widely,” Mackie said.

Mackie added that the student evaluations should not be used as the sole metric for the evaluation of a teacher.

“They are an evaluation of exactly what it says — a student evaluation, the evaluation of a student’s perception of his or her experience,” she said.

Both Mackie and Breyer said they have found that having the course evaluations online has decreased the percentage of students who fill out the evaluations.

Breyer also proposed an argument for having different kinds of evaluations based on a student’s academic year.

“By the time you’re a senior you have a more mature overview of the process,” Breyer said. “I think its just wonderful that we listen to students, and that’s a statement that we make.”

Published on December 7, 2015 at 9:40 pm

Contact Stacy: sfern100@syr.edu | @StacyFernandezB