A new pilot program set for implementation in fall 2005 will allow all students access to former course evaluations for professors whose classes they are considering.
The program will be Web-based and most likely run through ITC, according to Student Council President Noah Sullivan and J. Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs. The course evaluation guide will be accessible through the Instructional Toolkit.
"This has been an ongoing project that the Council's had for years, ever since 2000," Sullivan said. "We were getting a heck of a lot of resistance because there was a question of whether students should have access to course evaluations."
Sullivan said that after Council established a committee to lobby for universal public student evaluations, much more headway was made on the matter.
In order for course evaluations to be publicly available, at least 65 percent of students in a class must participate in the evaluation survey, Adams said. The current response rate is anywhere from 20 to 100 percent.
"This past year it varied from class to class and school to school," Adams said. "In order for the evaluations to be accurate, a high response rate is very important -- that's why [the committee] recommended the 65 percent response rate to get a good cross-section of the class."
Other external venues offer student course evaluations, such as the Web site ratemyprofessors.com. But such services can be vulnerable to response biases since anyone can fill out an evaluation and there is no response rate required.
Sullivan said he hopes the incentive of open course evaluations that are more statistically accurate will prompt more students to respond to the evaluation survey.
"As compared to ratemyprofessors.com, the program we've proposed is scientific data available to students," Sullivan said. "Any type of thing where you have 65 percent response rate is more reliable because otherwise you only have people that hated [a course] or loved it. A more realistic course guide should be a great resource."
The course evaluations will be standardized prior to the implementation of the course guide. They ask the participants to respond to six statements using a five-point rating scale, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
According to Adams, some University schools and departments already have this program in place. However, this fall the evaluations will be applicable to all university courses. Sullivan also said that Council had run a similar program during the late 1970s or early 1980s but had to stop due to the overwhelming amount of energy required to run it.
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