Making the Most of Your Course Evaluations

Course evaluations can be valuable tools for improving teaching and course design. Improving students’ rating of a course may also deepen the amount that students learn and will certainly make a professor’s life in the classroom more pleasant.

The format of Penn evaluations (which focuses on numerical ratings) does not always generate ideas about improving an instructor’s performance.  This guide to interpreting those evaluations is designed to help you make the most of those numbers. It is based on a similar site at Dartmouth’s Center for the Advancement of Learning but revised to reflect Penn’s forms.

Click Here for a PDF version of Penn's Course Evaluation.

Click Here for advice about specific questions on Penn's forms.

 

If you would like more detailed, qualitative feedback from your students at the end of the semester, CTL had created an Open-Ended Form and a list of questions for that form that you can use in addition to the “bubble form” and tailor to your own class.

Click Here for help finding your results on-line.

General Advice

•  Reading student evaluations can be stressful.  Ask a trusted friend or colleague to help you put the numbers into perspective.

•  Examine patterns.  Often instructors focus on individual students who are deeply dissatisfied but those individual responses are often meaningless.  Look for ratings that repeat even in less dissatisfied students.

•  Remember that this is a dialogue.  Evaluations should encourage you to reflect on your class but they are not the last word.

•  Get other feedback.  Student evaluations alone are not the only measure of your abilities as a teacher. You may want to consider having other faculty observe your class or evaluate your syllabi or assignments. 

•  Ignore small differences.  If your student evaluations have dropped a few tenths of a point from last semester, you are not becoming worse as a teacher.  

•  Visit the Center for Teaching and Learning to arrange for observations, get a recording of your teaching, or strategize about ways to respond to student evaluations.

 (from Darmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning "Interpreting Your Course Evalautions"

Jane S. Holanen, George B. Ellenberg, “Teaching Evaluating Follies:  Misperception and Misbehavior in Student Evaluations of Teachers,” in Peter Seldin, Evaluating Faculty Performance (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 2006) 154-156)