Evaluations are a great way for students to contribute in the success of this institution. Each semester the university basically asks students, “How are we doing?”
This is a perfect opportunity for individuals to speak what is on their minds, yet students are seriously lacking in participation. Instead they are doing the bare minimum.
Department deans and chairs have spoken openly and explained evaluations are tools used to gauge how well individual professors are doing in the classroom. Something the faculty takes seriously.
The Wichitan thinks the concept of evaluations is a great idea in theory, unfortunately due to a lack of students taking the process seriously, classroom quality remains stagnant in many situations.
We are curious why students aren’t taking the evaluation process seriously. It might be how the evaluations are presented to them in class.
At most big university’s their course/professor evaluations are all online.
When we took a closer look at the student evaluation itself, we noticed the lengthy statement of intent, which we are sure no students read. It states – in all caps – “It is your responsibility to contribute to the improvement of this university by taking time now to think seriously about this evaluation and to give a clearly reasoned analysis of your instructor’s teaching.”
It also states that the evaluation’s purpose is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of instructors and to help improve their teaching skills.
All of this sounds all good and dandy, yet when it comes down to it, how many students actually read the 20 statements, in which they rank the instructor from poor to excellent?
We bet not many.
What professors probably do get the most out of is the comment section on the back which asks what went well in the class and how could the course be improved.
Students have to physically write a reply to these questions and no matter the length, at least professors are getting some form of participation and critical thinking.
If the university really wanted to analyze a professor’s teaching skills, administrators would alter how we do professor and course evaluations.
First, can we discuss why the university is still shelling out money for these paper evaluations? It is no secret that this university is suffering from being years behind technology wise from its competition and this is a perfect example. This student evaluation should be administered online.
Apparently years ago this was how the university did evaluations. They were all online, but they stopped doing that and went back to the paper form because student’s weren’t filling them out.
So instead of thinking ahead, the university took the step back into the 80s.
We have a suggestion – make students want to fill out the evaluations. Make students feel like they matter!
Why? Because they have found a way to make it profitable to them.
We suggest the university make filling out the evaluations a requirement. With the new student portal system being released next semester, this shouldn’t be hard to do.
There should also be a consequence if students do not fill out the form. Say if the evaluations are done via Webworld – if students do not fill out the course evaluations they won’t be able to sign up for classes the following semester or will not receive their grades for the current semester if it isn’t complete.
Another suggestion would be for the online evaluation itself, don’t have ranking questions. Lets be honest, students aren’t going to take that seriously.
If college deans really want feedback, they should suggest every question on the student evaluation result in open-ended short answer responses. Only then will they know how a professor is really translating to his or her students.
In this economic climate and during the university’s current budget woes, we don’t understand why administrators aren’t looking at any and every reason to cut spending, even if it is by a few hundred or thousand dollars.
So MSU lets step into 2013.
If Midwestern wants to compete with larger university, it needs to start improving and upgrading how they operate.