Faculty Course Evaluations

Wednesday, September 20 2006

FCE's have been part of campus life for decades. This deliberative poll will discuss various formats for delivering and assessing course evaluations and the role they play in evaluating courses and teaching.

The results of this poll will serve as an additional source of information for many of those on campus who are making recommendations to the Provost on the format and use of the FCE, the Faculty Senate being among them.

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"Interpreting the Results of the Deliberative Poll on FCEs"

Robert Cavalier, Campus Conversations Project

Detailed analysis of participant and observer comments from the September Campus Conversation on FCEs provides us with an interesting opportunity to interpret the deliberative poll report.

Over and over again participants noted the conflated nature of the FCEs as attempting to provide three functions: a way for students to see how courses are evaluated by other students; a way to provide ‘formative feedback to professors’ for improvements to their courses; and an assessment of teaching to be used in faculty Tenure and Promotion cases.

Reviewing comments by faculty and students as well as reports from moderators and facilitators, a consensus seemed to emerge: Instruments and delivery mechanisms should emerge to handle each of these functions separately. FCEs of the kind proposed by the Faculty Committee and approved by the Faculty Senate would provide students with general information about courses and, perhaps, red flags to faculty and administrators in extreme and consistent cases. There was majority support for this to be provided by the University and delivered online. But the real issue in the comments was function and use, not online verses paper (even technology-enhanced scan sheets and pdf files to image comments).

More detailed and customized FCEs for the purpose of course feedback and improvement should be used by departments and individual faculty to more accurately assess the teaching and learning process. These could be delivered as paper and pencil or embedded questions in a Blackboard anonymous-survey tool. Other, more sophisticated assessment tools could also be used at the discretion of the department (pre- and post- tests of learning outcomes, etc.). Finally, in addition to these feedback mechanisms, peer review and teaching portfolios could be utilized for purposes of Tenure and Promotion. These suggestions would be made at the college or department level.

Speaking generally, the Faculty Senate’s recommendation fits with the deliberative poll’s majority desire for the University to provide some online assessment mechanism. But the deliberations also point to a more complex role for FCEs. Participant comments recognize other forms of assessment and these in turn address concerns by Clark Glymour and others that rating ‘course quality’ and ‘instructor quality’ puts pressure on faculty to adjust their courses and teaching to the outcome of the FCE. Under this tripartite reading of the content and delivery of FCEs, the other forms of assessment should trump ‘Rate-the-Professor’ results in cases of divergence.

-- Focus, November 2006