Completion rate of course evaluation forms has ranged in the 60 percent area since Ball State started its grade holding policy two years ago.
The form response rate for the entire university was 63 percent and 64 percent for this past Fall and Spring Semesters, respectively.
The course evaluation forms are used to evaluate the quality of a course and how successful the faculty member was at communicating the material, goals and expectations. Students can suggest improvements, as well.
Classes evaluated must have four or more enrolled students. The process involves a set of university core questions and can include additional ones if the instructor, department or college chooses.
The average score of the core questions is 4.2 for the university on a five-point scale.
However, these numbers may vary from department to department and from college to college.
In 2012, the university created its grade holding policy, which adds a holding period on student grades for a few days. Response rate was 48.25 percent that spring before the policy took place. Once it did, the rate rose to 69.7 percent in fall 2012.
Evaluations are handed out before the end of a semester and the submission period ends before final grades are posted. Faculty members do not receive their evaluations until the final grades are posted.
The grade holding policy doesn’t make James Jones, director of the Office of Research and Academic Effectiveness, concerned about the quality of the responses.
“I made a comparison [of the data] with the grade holds and without,” he said. “They were virtually identical.”
There would be cause to worry if the policy required students to fill out evaluations to get their grades, Jones said.
“You’d probably have more people being angry when they fill out the evaluation,” he said. “Now, they are just angry and [don’t] have to fill out an evaluation.”
The university did try a positive incentive for the Fall Semester in 2011. Students who completed their evaluations were entered to win one of six iPad 2s. Response rate for that semester was 62.4 percent.
“It was a last-minute experiment from the administration — evaluations had already been open for some time then,” Jones said. “[It was a] one time kind of thing.”
He said the grade holding policy has been largely successful.
“Without the grade hold, we were in the low,” Jones said. “Now we are in more of the 60s. [The response rate] roughly increased 10 points.”
Greg Nelson, a senior sports administration major, said he began doing all of his evaluations when the grade holding policy took place. Prior to the policy, he filled them out only when he had a good class or instructor.
The holds have not impacted his approach to answering the forms.
“Besides the fact that I do them all, I still do them honestly,” he said.
Aside from evaluating instructors, another way the forms could be used is to evaluate the effectiveness of a program, said John Jacobson, dean of the Teachers College.
“You aggregate those evaluations and then could see how the ratings and how well the faculty have delivered that program,” he said.
For department heads and deans, they can’t rely on one testing method to evaluate faculty performance for salary changes, tenure, contract renewal or continued teaching of a course, said Jacobson and Michel Mounayar, associate dean for the College of Architecture and Planning.
Once a year, faculty have to file an annual report to their chairperson or dean. The report includes the course evaluations along with peer evaluations and other components.
Jacobson said the Teachers College tries to keep a fair balance and not favor one particular measuring method for determining a faculty member’s effectiveness. He said there are some departments that favor course evaluations more than others.
However, Jacobson has taught at three other universities and said he favors Ball State’s method the most for its multifaceted approach. He said other universities will get private companies to conduct evaluations, which helps compare universities to one another.
“It’s something Ball State shouldn’t do,” he said. “What we have works.”
Kirsten Duff, a sophomore nursing major, fills out her evaluations to get her grades on time.
“They are repetitive and some are long,” she said. “I don’t know how much a professor will gain by me filling it out. It’s not in-depth.”
Faculty look for trends in course evaluations and then through the comments to find outliers and a consistency of response, said Mounayar and Elizabeth Riddle, chairperson for the English department.
“What you want to do, as a faculty member, is look at patterns [in the data] for what went well in methods and administration,” Mounayar said.
For Riddle’s department, they look at every evaluation.
“We look at every evaluation, we’ve always done this for the past 30 years I have been here,” she said. “Also, it’s not all black and white. You need to look at the context [of the evaluations]. They’re helpful, and we take them seriously.”
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