For the past 20 years, Stony Brook students have stared at the same teacher evaluation sheets at the end of every semester. They filled in comments, bubbled in numbers and then raced out of the classroom never knowing where the evaluations went, who looked at them or if they held any actual weight in important decisions.
“I don’t think the evaluations we’ve been using are doing much because students aren’t actually thinking of ways that they can improve the class or teaching,” said Vanessa Antoine, a senior. “Most of the time they just put generic answers for the generic questions.”
According to Dr. Graham Glynn, assistant provost and executive director of Teaching, Learning and Technology at Stony Brook, it’s time to revamp the outdated system and implement something more effective. A new system, which will be tested out in some courses at the end of this semester, will place teacher evaluation forms online.
“Today about 20 percent of evaluations are invalid,” Glynn said. “The student puts the wrong I.D. number or class code, or something on the evaluation and it can’t be used. With a computer based system, that error will be eliminated.”
Along with eliminating errors, the new system will allow professors to view the evaluations just three to four days after the final course grades are posted. With the old paper system, faculty often went four months without seeing the reports, making it nearly impossible for professors to construct revised lesson plans for the next semester.
“The switch will also reduce the work of processing, sorting, distributing and typing up the comments,” Glynn said. “All the things the staff has to do to prepare these evaluations, which is why it takes so long to get back to the faculty.”
The new structure will also aim to have students fill out assessments four to five weeks into the term so that professors have the opportunity to make changes for the current semester.
“The reports that they’ll get will be much richer,” Glynn said. “Rather than just seeing their own scores, they’ll be able to compare themselves with other faculty in their departments and all assistant professors across the university.”
The online evaluations will also be more earth friendly. While the old paper forms cost thousands of dollars and were ordered in hundreds of thousands of batches, the new evaluations will be accessible from any computer with an active Net I.D. and password.
A potential issue will be student participation. Other universities that use online evaluations report that while the quality of responses has increased, the amount of students participating decreased.
The new evaluation system is expected to be in full effect by spring semester 2011. The system will continue to be confidential for students and may even offer rewards for those who participate.
“If it’s for a class where I really like the teacher or really hate the teacher, then I’ll probably still fill it out,” said Rebecca Sklaw, a sophomore. “But it has to be a class that I have a strong opinion about, or I probably wont.”
