At least for many of you. This semester over half of the student body will see a difference in the way that faculty evaluations are done. The questions asked remain the same, and we hope that your commitment to the process will remain as impressive, and extraordinary as ever, but we are piloting a new, electronic delivery and submission process.
Nearly thirty faculty members will have their evaluations delivered to their students online. This will include some first-year classes, some sophomore classes and some upper-level classes, some big classes and some small classes, some Hum 110 and some introductory science classes. Not all students will be part of this pilot, but, as noted above, as many as half of you will be, so please read on, even if you are thoroughly familiar with the normal process. I will talk through how the new delivery system works first!
Students who are in the pilot classes will receive an email on the Friday of the penultimate week of classes, April 24, directing them to IRIS. A link to the faculty evaluations system will be clearly visible on your IRIS login page, and once there the process will look much like it does on paper: you will be asked to fill in numerical evaluations (“bubble sheets”) for whichever class or classes are part of the internet pilot, to provide feedback to your professor (“white forms”) and to provide feedback to the Committee on Advancement and Tenure on your professor (“tan forms”). As usual, the white form material will go to the professor, the bubble sheet material will go to both the professor and the evaluation committee, and the tan form material will go only to the evaluation committee, and will count only if you (electronically) sign your evaluation.
You may complete the evaluations at your leisure, but must complete them before the end of the exam period, which concludes on Thursday, May 14. That is a three-week window. You can begin them one day and finish them later if you wish. You will be logged out after 30 minutes if you do nothing for that long. Completed pages will be stored. If you have not completed the evaluations by the relevant dates, you will receive reminder emails on May 4, May 11 and May 14.
A very limited number of classes are on a different evaluation schedule. One of these is Bio 102, and students in Bio 102 have the privilege of being the first students to do electronic evaluations, as a section of the class will soon be evaluated in this manner. Students will receive an e-notification, and that email will lay out the different dates for this schedule.
Why change? Electronic delivery and collection of this data presents several immediate advantages and some significant possibilities in the future. Among the immediate plusses, it frees up class time, allows students to fill in evaluations when they feel prepared to do so (or at least when they are ready within that three-week window), ensures that students can fill in evaluations after classes and exams are complete, ensures that students have as much time as they need to fill them in, catches any students who have to be absent on the relevant day, and separates out professors from the often awkward process of distributing their own evaluations. It also means you can type your evaluations, which we guess many of you will prefer. From the point of view of the evaluation committee, submissions will be type-written (easier to read), and can be more efficiently packaged and studied electronically (rather than in a single paper file). Numerical data can also be more easily presented in a variety of helpful ways. Faculty members will also be able to store and retrieve their evaluations more easily once they are in electronic form.
In future, the system also offers the possibility of additional customized questions, which is exciting. A significant number of professors already ask informal customized questions.
Why a pilot? The most important element in the success of a faculty evaluation system is the quantity and quality of the feedback. While the above advantages are very real and very promising, the present delivery system produces very good feedback in terms of both quantity and quality, and we want to be sure those results continues with a different medium.
As many of you have probably heard me say before, the larger goal of the faculty evaluation system is to ensure that we have a healthy academic program and a faculty committed to teaching of the highest quality. Your input is crucial to this, and I can assure you that it is taken very seriously. One of the great things about Reed students, about you, is that you take faculty evaluations so seriously. We all share responsibility for the health of the educational program and we all have a part to play in maintaining it. As an aside, we will be introducing the evaluation system to all new students as part of orientation next year.
All faculty members are regularly evaluated, whether they are up for reappointment or are continuing faculty members, including senior, tenured faculty members. A positive evaluation represents recognition of a hard job done well, and is also necessary for promotion up the ranks. For some faculty, their continued employment at the College is dependent on a positive (overall) evaluation.
Good teaching is a requirement for a successful evaluation, but there are two other considerations also: a faculty member’s scholarship and research and a faculty member’s service to the wider College community beyond the teaching of their classes (committee work, special events, etc.). Thesis advising and academic advising are considered part of a faculty member’s teaching responsibilities.
Student evaluations are not the only inputs: faculty write letters and the faculty member submits a CV and self-evaluation. In the case of a tenure decision, letters are also sought from faculty from other institutions in the professor’s field of study.
(You may be asking yourself, “What is tenure?” Tenure is a commitment made by an academic institution to an individual faculty member to maintain their position at the institution except (roughly) in cases of significantly poor performance or personal misconduct. Tenure provides a faculty member with protection against being removed for ideas that are, for example, offensive or unpopular or unfashionable (as opposed to poorly researched or poorly communicated), while also providing, in the words of the American Association of University Professors, a “sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive” to strong candidates. Tenure is awarded after excellent performance during a significant probationary period, known as the tenure track.)
Three kinds of feedback are sought from students. The white forms do not play a part in a faculty member’s evaluation; those are private communications between the student and the professor, distributed to the professor after grades have been submitted. The green bubble sheets are tallied anonymously, and the results go both to the faculty member and in the evaluation file (again, after grades have been submitted). The tan-colored, open-ended evaluation forms only go in the evaluation files, and cannot be left anonymous if they are to be considered by the Committee on Advancement and Tenure. Evaluation files are confidential and are very rarely seen by a particular faculty member. In the rare event that a faculty member requests to see their file, every effort will be made to protect students’ identities.
Finally, students are also welcome to write letters at any time and submit them to the Dean of Faculty’s office for inclusion in an evaluation file; this can be a particularly good way to provide an evaluation of teaching functions not tied to specific classes, such as research mentoring, thesis advising or academic advising. This option will remain open for professors who are part of the electronic pilot.
The green bubble sheets ask pointed and specific questions, but are a relatively blunt instrument, and cannot on their own provide a well-rounded picture. The open-ended tan evaluation sheets are critical in this respect. The more detail, the better: please avoid simple judgments such as “So and so rocks!” or “So and so was terrible,” and offer instead information that leads you to make that judgment, such as “X was a strength” or “Y was a weakness.” Specific and detailed examples are very helpful.
The most helpful evaluations are those that show the most thought about the goals and pedagogy of a given class, irrespective of the student’s personal performance, and that explore those goals or measure the professor’s performance against those goals. How well were the goals communicated? How well were they fulfilled through the syllabus, the homework, the assignments, the feedback, the discussions, the exams, etc.? What concrete things did professor X do that contributed to your understanding of the material? Please avoid evaluating the professor on things out of their control, such as classes that are not being offered or the College’s facilities or the professor’s personal appearance or style. Please also avoid judgments of taste. If you did not like the material in a class, distinguish what the professor brought to the material from the material itself. Did professor Y make it interesting? Or did they increase your understanding of it and similar materials? The point is to evaluate the quality of the teaching in a particular class.
If you need more time to do your evaluations, do take them away with you and turn them in to the registrar later yourself.
Finally, thank you, on behalf on the Commitment on Advancement and Tenure and the College in general, for being part of this process, and taking the time to read this unusually long article on evaluation. Student input is crucial to the evaluation process and to a high-quality academic program, and, thankfully, every year we receive much truly thoughtful and careful feedback.