Course Evaluations
Course evaluations can be very useful, so I like to do informal ones in the middle of the semester. Here’s an example of a course evaluation that I have used. Right after the first exam is a good time because you can ask whether the exam was fair, whether there was enough help available to the students, and how they feel in general about how things are going. If you assure them that the evaluations will be anonymous, I’ve found students are usually willing to give you honest feedback. The good thing about doing mid-semester evaluations is that you have time to fix things! You just have to keep in mind that you can’t please all the students all the time; look for broad trends in their comments to tell you what you need to work on.
You don’t want to do mid-semester evaluations in class, because it will take too long (you want the students to spend time thinking about the questions). But you also want to make sure you get a majority of them back. Steve Tufte and I successfully dealt with this by stapling the evaluation form to a homework assignment. We had the students tear the evaluation off before turning both sheets in separately. It was a good way to make sure people remembered the evaluation. I suppose you could even give extra credit for bringing it back, but we didn’t find that necessary.
Regarding official course evaluations, you should be aware that the professor for your course will normally keep the actual evaluation sheets. That means even though you will have a record of your numerical evaluation scores, you won’t have any student comments to refer to in the future. These sometimes come in handy if you want to apply for teaching-related positions or awards. I’d suggest asking your professor to lend you the stack of evaluations and photocopying or transcribing a few of the good comments. Keep these around in case you ever need them. If you don’t do this when the evaluations come out, it may be hard to find these records several years down the line.
Jennifer Hoffman (2/00)