The first session of summer school ended last Friday.
Among the usual things students get to do when a semester ends (like sell their books back for a tenth of what they paid) they get one chance to give the teachers a little anonymous feedback.
Teacher course evaluations, for those of you who need a better description, are pencil-in-the-bubble forms that are handed out to students towards the last week of class. Questions vary from "I feel the teacher treated me with respect," to the basic "T he teacher provided adequate office hours." TCE's also let students write a few paragraphs worth of feedback to the teacher, as the forms are anonymous and instructors don't have access to them until after they have turned in their grades.
Speaking from experience, most students who fill out the TCE just bubble in a few areas and skip the comments. I wouldn't say that all students think their input ends up directly in the trash, but I would say that the majority of students c onsider the TCE about as effective as those little buttons that are supposed to make the stoplight turn red when you want to cross the street. If you ask me, students view TCE's as more of a semester's end ritual then a means of evaluation.
And you're probably thinking TCE's sound like a pretty damn boring thing to write a column about.
Well, yes, but for those of you that remember, UA's evaluation results will be going online this fall. ASUA, the Faculty Senate and a handful of other people had been kicking around the i dea of publishing the TCE's since last year but the decision to put the evaluations online came after budget estimates said it could be done for $10,00o to $19,000 less than it would havetaken to put them into print.
When I was filling out a TCE last week, I wondered if my input was going to make it online in time to possibly help the students arriving for the fall semester.
I talked to Jennifer Franklin, coordinator for Instructional Assessment and Evaluation Services, which is the service that collects and deals with the thousands of TCE's every semester. They're the ones who are wiring their evaluations database for web a ccess.
According to Franklin, the project is scheduled to go online in mid-August, just in time for the returning hordes of Fall students to give it a good test run. While the plan is to begin with data from the 1996-97 school year, it is unclear whether summer evaluations will go online. Decisions regarding summer school pr ocedures, including the evaluations, are made by the Office of the Summer Session, who hasn't made it clear if that data will be online. It is also unclear whether the data for GAT's will be included in the database, or data from lab sections.
In other words, there are still a lot of 'ifs', but it's coming.
The UA's online evaluations won't contain students' handwritten comments, nor will it be as thorough as the versions Instructional Assessment and Evaluation Services will provide to each department, said Franklin. The online version will be a summary, bas ically, providing only the percentages based on how many students answered each specific question for each teacher, per semester.
While students will have an obvious use for online TCE's, it will be the first time many faculty will have the chance to see the results for their peers, Franklin said. Until now, each department has made the decision to whether to make the full results a vailable to its instructors, or just hand out the results on a per-instructor basis.
As to whether the online TCE's will have a significant effect on the way students schedule their classes, Franklin's reaction was mixed. While online TCE's should help those students who have already scheduled and are looking to make a few adjustments, sh e said, there are many occasions where students have no choice but to accept a class due to the number of sections.
I agree, but for slightly different reasons. Franklin is right about online TCE's not making a serious dent in student scheduling habits, but I attribute this more to the fact that very rarely do schedules actually list who is teaching a class. As for stu dents looking for help in adjusting an existing schedule, I'm sure online TCE's will fill a definite niche. If anything, they're going to drive the people who handle all those drop/add forms crazy - I only forsee an upswing in the amount of schedule shuff ling during the week before school.
Franklin mentioned one other issue, in that online evaluations might bring about a more rigid method of overseeing the evaluation process. As it is now, a student from each class hands out and collects the TCE's, and is also responsible for getting them t o drop boxes on campus. Once the evaluations go online for the whole world to see, instructors may want a greater assurance that the student couldn't tamper or skew the evaluations.
So, my question is this: If the university feels comfortable enough restricting the evaluation data to on-campus use, why don't they move the entire process online? They could elmiminate all of their paper and handling costs and eliminate the tampe ring/falsification risk at the same time. The same students-only access scheme could be used to verify everyone's identity. Heck, moving evaluations online might even weed out the people who only answer the first three questions and skip the rest of the f orm, meaning those who fill out the evaluations are the people who really have something to say.
I doubt that will ever happen, but for now we'll wait and see how, or even if, students use the evaluation information this fall. Until then, keep watching UAInfo for the addition, and good luck picking classes. :)

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