Form: Faculty Evaluation - Essay Example

Student ratings are sensitive to a wide variety of situational factors. For example, student anonymity should be protected otherwise less than candid responses are likely because of the students’ fear that an adverse rating might negatively impact their course grade (www.oid.ucla.edu). This aspect is taken care of in the CIEQ Form 15 under consideration here. However, in addition to the information provided at the top of p.3 of Form 15 viz., “Your instructor will not see……until after final grades are in, etc.,” the students should be advised to print their response so as to minimize the chance of identification through handwriting. Furthermore, to ensure the confidentiality of the student evaluators, the evaluation should not be conducted by the instructors or TAs nor should they be present when the evaluation is conducted. A responsible student should be assigned the job of distributing the questionnaires, collecting the completed forms, and delivering them to the department office (www.oid.ucla.edu).

The effectiveness of the evaluation will improve if the questionnaire is designed to evaluate both quantitatively (using evaluative scales) and qualitatively (through narrative comments) (Davis, http://teaching.berkeley.edu). The CIEQ Form 15 does provide for both types of evaluation. However, the quantitative part of the Form (p.1) is a jumble of repetitive questions. For instance, Question #1, “It was a very worthwhile course,” Q#6 “NOT much was gained by taking this course” and Q#15 “This was one of my poorest courses,” all seek to evaluate the same aspect. Similarly, Q#4 “The course material was too difficult” is no different from #8 “The course material seemed worthwhile.” Again, there is this old wine (from Q#7 “I would have preferred another method of teaching in this course”) in a new bottle (Q#12 “I learn more when other teaching methods are used”)! Q#5 “It was easy to remain attentive” is another form of #17 “Some days I was NOT very interested in this course.” Thus, essentially there are only about 12 original questions. And, of the total of 28 items in Form 15, only 2 or 3 (i.e., around 10%) are designed to evaluate the instructional delivery and design skills of the teacher. There is no item in Form 15 that evaluates the overall effectiveness of the instructor which the students can judge best. An appropriate question for this, according to Davis, would be, “What do you perceive to be the greatest strengths and weaknesses of this instructor's teaching?” (http://teaching.berkeley.edu). In comparison, Question #14, “The instructor demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the subject matter” has no place in this questionnaire since students are not qualified to judge the instructors’ depth of knowledge.

Effective student rating forms should also include questions on accessibility, organization and preparation, and interaction, and especially use unambiguous items such as "instructor defines new or unfamiliar terms," "repeats difficult concepts," "provides frequent examples" to capture specific behaviors that are amenable to change (Davis, http://teaching.berkeley.edu). The negative style of asking questions is not proper. Form15 has several examples of it: #6 “NOT much was gained by taking this course”, #13 “Some things were NOT explained very well” and others.

In conclusion, the CIEQ Form 15 protects the confidentiality of the student evaluators. However, the questions are repetitive with a majority of them being about the course in general, rather than the teaching skills of the instructor.