“Student satisfaction surveys.”

That’s one way education professor Jon Wagner describes student course evaluations. He acknowledges their value, but warns against taking them too seriously.

“Student evaluations are not the most important way to gauge the effectiveness of an instructor,” said Wagner, director of the Teaching Resources Center and an expert on technology in teaching and learning. “How much students are learning in the course is more important—not how much they like or dislike a professor.”

Online ratings

That is the crux of the problem, he says, with online rating sites like ratemyprofessors.com. They focus on the wrong questions (easy or hard, agreeable or disagreeable) and fail to give the whole picture, he believes. Only a few students are motivated enough to register and post comments, and the sites provide no evidence about how much most students learn from taking a course.

What if UC Davis put all its course evaluations (“satisfaction surveys”) online and made them public, as some faculty members have recommended? Would this dry up student demand for advertising-driven sites like ratemyprofessors.com (which is owned by MTVu)? Would it complicate the current student evaluation process on campus?

Wagner points out that written student evaluations are a required feature of all UC Davis courses. The evaluations are administered by departments to include both “check-off” and “open-ended” questions. Computer scanning scoring is used for the check-off items, but answers to open ended questions have to be transcribed manually, he said.

As a result, it can take weeks or even months for instructors to get a full set of evaluations, he added. An online system would reduce the workload for department staff and give faculty more immediate feedback.

With this in mind, the Campus Council for Information Technology recommended in June 2007 that the campus consider developing an online course evaluation process. (A few departments already do this on their own.)

Today, a draft plan and timeline implementing an online course evaluation process into the campus’s SmartSite is under review by the Academic Senate’s Information Technology Committee. Questions about whether or not online evaluations would be made public are still being debated, Wagner noted.

He said many measurements exist to determine whether a class or a teacher is an effective learning experience. They all start by asking the right questions:

“What do we want students to learn?” Wagner said. “How can we tell when they know it? And how can we tell what our teaching has contributed to what they know?”

More information about the Teaching Resources Center: trc.ucdavis.edu/trc