By a collective decision of the faculty of Grinnell College, we now administer the same student-evaluation form in all of our courses except the first-year tutorial. The form presents six assertions, oddly referred to as ``questions'':
The course sessions were conducted in a manner that helped me to understand the subject matter of the course.
The instructor helped me to understand the subject matter of the course.
Work completed with and/or discussions with other students in this course helped me to understand the subject matter of the course.
The oral and written work, tests, and/or other assignments helped me to understand the subject matter of the course.
Required readings or other course materials helped me to understand the subject matter of the course.
I learned a lot in this course.
The student is invited to disagree strongly, disagree moderately, disagree slightly, agree slightly, agree moderately, or agree strongly with each of these assertions, or to decline to express an opinion (``Not Applicable/Don't Know''). The Office of Institutional Research tallies the responses and returns the tallies to the teacher of the course.
In the first-year tutorial, we use a similar but slightly more elaborate form, inviting students to agree or disagree with a total of eighteen assertions.
The faculty approved the use of the results of these evaluations for only one purpose: When a faculty member is being reviewed (for retention, promotion, or tenure), the Personnel Committee receives the results of his or her evaluations. However, factoids derived from the evaluations are equally useful -- indeed, exactly equally useful -- in many other contexts. At the suggestion of the President of the College, therefore, I have made the results of evaluations of my courses available for whatever purposes readers may conceive. I invite comments and suggestions from interested readers.
The OIR also computes various additional statistics from the tallies by awarding points for each response according to the following table:
| Response | Score |
|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 1 point |
| Moderately Disagree | 2 points |
| Slightly Disagree | 3 points |
| Slightly Agree | 4 points |
| Moderately Agree | 5 points |
| Strongly Agree | 6 points |
Using these scores, the OIR computes a 95% confidence interval for the supposed mean score for each question, and sometimes includes these in its reports to teachers. Because computing such intervals exemplifies the elementary statistical fallacy that is explained in my article ``Scales,'' I have not bothered to reproduce them here.
For comparison, here are the college-wide aggregate results. (However, the Office of Institutional Research compiled at least some of these tallies by a method that yields incorrect results. The data in these tables should therefore be taken as approximate.)
In interpreting evaluations from previous years, readers may wish to take into account the secular inflation of ratings, particularly on questions 2 and 6. Note, for instance, the rise in the percentage of students giving the response "strongly agree" to each question:
| Question | "Strongly agree," spring 1999 | "Strongly agree," spring 2009 |
|---|---|---|
| The course sessions were conducted in a manner that helped me to understand the subject matter of the course. | 48% | 52% |
| The instructor helped me to understand the subject matter of the course. | 49% | 65% |
| Work completed with and/or discussions with other students in this course helped me to understand the subject matter of the course. | 39% | 44% |
| The oral and written work, tests, and or other assignments helped me to understand the subject matter of the course. | 38% | 46% |
| Required readings or other course materials helped me to understand the subject matter of the course. | 41% | 45% |
| I learned a lot in this course. | 53% | 63% |
Professor Rebelsky's essay ``About end-of-course evaluations'' explains the purpose and recent history of student evaluations at Grinnell in greater detail. (It's also more interesting reading than this page.)
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/evaluations/
created January 18, 2001
last revised June 11, 2009