A new course evaluations program is coming to the College of Arts & Sciences, the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts starting this fall.

While Olin Business School evaluations will remain in their traditional paper-based, in-class format, all other undergraduate students will notice a change in evaluation release dates, a website overhaul, mobile usage and increased integration with University online systems like WebSTAC. Additionally, students in ArtSci will notice a change in both the type and length of questions asked.

The program, initially spearheaded by College of Arts & Sciences Dean Jen Smith four years ago, was created in response to falling student evaluation response rates. Most years, the average response rate hovered around 50 percent, with some classes reflecting even lower numbers.

After reviewing prior research regarding student receptiveness to evaluations, Smith hopes to get response rates closer to 75 or 80 percent of all undergraduate students through the new mobile version of the evaluations site.

“As a dean, I wanted to really work with departments to say ‘We need to do better at taking the feedback we’re getting from evals and using that to make classes better,’ [but] chairs and faculty said with only 25, 30 or 35 percent of students responding, we’re not going to just do what that fraction says,” Smith said.

In an effort to further improve the responses and accessibility of the system, the dates that evaluations open up will be changed. Registrar Services Specialist Laura Setchfield, who helps manage the transition, hopes that this change will allow evaluations to better reflect students’ experiences in the courses.

“A course that was a short course or an eight-week will get its evaluation at the end of the class, as opposed to the end of the semester,” Setchfield said. “So, it allows students to give that feedback upon completion of the course, while it’s still fresh in their mind.”

Other major changes in the mobile accessibility of evaluations and the format of questions were aimed to improve student satisfaction with the site, Smith said. ArtSci questionnaires now feature fewer scaled questions—those on a range of one to seven in terms of satisfaction—and more short answer responses.

“[Students] would say; ‘We prefer things like Rate My Professors because we actually get to know something about why people didn’t like the class,’ so we were also aware that we weren’t providing the kind of information that would allow students to make informed choices about which classes they wanted to take,” Smith said. “Some classes might be really hard, but they’re

also totally worth it…but it’s hard to know that.”

To display this information, students can see a “Word Cloud” for each course—a block of text with the most frequently used words in responses as the largest text. This allows those shopping for classes to get a sense of what the class will be like.

Setchfield and Smith both highly encouraged professors to offer students time to fill out the form on their mobile devices while in class, similar to past experiences using paper evaluations.  

Students in shorter eight-week courses can expect an email about evaluations opening five days before the end of the course, while regular session courses won’t open up until later in the semester, with reminder emails going out between four and six days after the initial release of the evaluations.