The French Department used online evaluations last semester for the first time, but this semester, French students again will write their evaluations in class following a low number of completed online evaluations in the fall, Chair Kandioura Drame said.
"The online evaluations across the board were fairly low," Drame said. "At this point we feel more confident with the paper evaluations."
The number of University students filling out course evaluations is declining, likely due to an increasing number of departments moving evaluations online, University Provost Gene Block told the Faculty Senate last week.
Department chairs said evaluations are one of many tools used to evaluate faculty performance. The evaluations, which ask students to provide feedback to their instructors and their department about both the class and the effectiveness of the instructor's teaching method, also are used by faculty themselves in order to improve both their teaching and their courses.
"I think the evaluations are not enough by themselves to evaluate the faculty, but they are an important piece of information," Anthropology Dept. Chair Ellen Contini-Morava said. "I look for trends -- if the same kind of criticism comes up in different evaluations then I take it more seriously than if it is just in one or two."
The anthropology department has stuck with written evaluations due to the higher response rate and quality of information, Contini-Morava said.
"Some people worried about to what use [evaluations] would be put if we switched to online evaluations," Contini-Morava said. "We wanted to retain control of what questions get asked and what gets done with the data."
Many other departments, though, are moving course evaluations online in a nod to technology and in response to tightening budgets.
The psychology department was the first department to switch to online evaluations, even before the service was made available through ITC.
Psychology Chair Timothy Wilson said it is much cheaper for the department to use online evaluations than to pay for copying and the salary of someone to scan the findings and put them into the computer.
"We were concerned with response rates, but we have not found a major difference between the two," Wilson said. "My sense is that the response rates are about the same in big lecture course and a little lower in seminars online, but we have been trying to address this problem in various ways."
One method Wilson uses to address the problem of non-response in the classes he teaches is to offer some extra-credit to students who fill out the evaluations.
"The response rate has been between 95 and 100 percent, much higher than with paper evaluations, when I have done this," Wilson said.
First-year Engineering student Caleb Ballew said that he takes the time to fill out evaluations whether they are in class or on the Internet.
"I feel that teachers need to know how they perform during the semester," Ballew said. "However, I think apathy tends to prevent other students from taking their time to fill out online evaluations."
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