Wanted: student evaluations
Posted by The Skyliner on April 21st, 2010Jamey Williams
Staff Writer
The time of the semester for papers, cramming and exams has made its way back around at North Greenville University, which also means students will have the opportunity to evaluate their professors through the Student Evaluation of Instruction surveys.
After several months of hard work by both faculty and students, the students are assessed by grades and the professors are assessed by the SEOIs. George Hopson, Jr., Director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, said that toward the end of each semester, students receive emails via their NGU email accounts that provide a link to the website where these surveys are located. After the surveys are completed, they can be printed for verification of completion. Then the link is blocked so that no changes can be made to the submitted survey.
When the deadline for submission has been reached, the data from the SEOIs is organized by course, instructor and college. The information is then given to the dean of each school, who review and distribute the information to department chairs. The data is used for general course evaluation and potential adjustment or improvement.
Hopson said, “It needs to be noted that often some courses have a very low response rate (such as two out of 20) which makes the data almost meaningless. A number of possible scenarios could be possible–only the disgruntled replied, only the very satisfied replied, only a few in the middle replied, one disgruntled replied and one very satisfied replied, but with only a few replies it is not statistically possible to know what the distribution of replies was, therefore the data is virtually useless.”
So it is vital that students take the time to honestly fill out a survey for each of their courses.
All professors that were asked about the SEOIs appreciate the value of the knowledge the surveys provide.
Rebecca Deal, Spanish professor, said, “When the students reflectively comment, taking into account their own personal need and responsibility to be active learners, as professors we can find out and even learn more about how helpful or not the class sessions’ activities are helping the students learn and put into practical use the course information and academic material.”
Adrian Pater, Christian studies professor, pointed out an often forgotten fact: “School is never over. As professors we should be willing to learn from our students how to be an even better professor. The fact is that we evaluate the students all semester. They should have the privilege to challenge us as well.”
Tags: Spring 2010, Vol. 110 - Issue 12