You've seen the questions before.
"Did this course help me develop professional skills?"
"Did the instructor use class time effectively?"
"Would you recommend this course to a friend?"
These are just a few examples of the questions Ball State University students could be asked in the next four weeks when student evaluation forms are distributed.
Provost Terry King said Ball State lets department faculty decide whether to hand out evaluations. He feels evaluations are beneficial, though, because they are a way for professors to receive feedback and for students to express opinion, he said.
"I think it is useful for every class to have an evaluation," he said.
Letting departments control the evaluations means they are not the same university-wide, and departments might hold instructors to different standards.
Lucinda Van Alst, chairwoman of the Department of Accounting, said while some colleges and departments only require professors to hand out one evaluation per semester, her department asks for more, especially from newer faculty.
"We encourage our new faculty to have it for every course, every semester," she said.
Jon Coddington, chairman of the Department of Architecture, said in his department faculty members are required to have all of their courses evaluated by students.
"It is something that I take seriously and the faculty takes seriously," he said.
James Jones, assistant director of research and design for University Computing Services, said every student evaluation form with bubbled fill-in-the blank questions goes through UCS. Each semester, the departments will give them the courses that will be evaluated, and UCS makes evaluation packets with instruction sheets that ask for the instructor's name, section, number of students and the course reference number, he said. The comments that students make on the sheets are only seen on a glance by UCS workers and they are not judged.
There is a five-point scale, one being the lowest, five being the highest, that students use to rate their professors, Jones said. Alice Spangler, chairwoman of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, said evaluations are done in a way that prevents the faculty from seeing them before they go to UCS.
Spangler said the summary sheets are given to each professor and can affect tenure, promotions and merit pay, which are salary considerations.
"I look through the summaries every semester and if I see a low evaluation I talk to the faculty member," she said.
Coddington said he goes through each faculty member's forms as well. If a faculty member scores a 3.5 or less, he will be alarmed, but he will praise those who score well, he said.
"I deal with the top 5 percent and the bottom 10 percent, roughly," Coddington said.
Coddington said tenured professors receive post-tenure evaluations every five years unless student evaluations indicate consistent poor performance; then reviews should take place sooner. Part of this evaluation involves an external reviewer from another university examining a faculty member's materials, he said. Coddington said there have not been serious issues with professors in the architecture department.
Susan McDowell, assistant professor of biology, said she does evaluation forms for each class she teaches.
"I look for overall trends for each question," she said. "Is the mean being influenced by a few disgruntled students? Or were they mainly scoring me around a 4?"
John Lorch, associate professor of mathematics, said all of the instructors in the math department are required to hand out forms for every course they teach. The standard forms are used except when there is a class with less then six students, and in that case a free response test is given which is open for general comments, he said.
David Jackson, chairman of the Department of Art, said each college within Ball State can come up with its own procedure for handing out evaluation forms. The only thing that is standard for every college and department, though, is that all the forms go through UCS, he said.
Jackson said a department within a college can never distribute more or fewer evaluation forms than the college.
"If you're a department within the college, you can't do something less thorough than what the college has written," he said.
UCS combines the bubbled answers into an evaluation summary, which gives an instructor an overall grade, he said.
Jones said he sees about 60,000 forms per semester, and all of the scoring takes about six weeks. After everything is scanned and re-sealed in a new envelope, the forms are returned to the departmental offices, he said.
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