The basics of faculty evaluation

At the end of the semester, evaluations will be going out as usual. To outline the basics, there will be three forms: Numerical evaluations (bubble sheets) which ask questions about the class with bubble answers; Feedback to professor forms (white sheets) which provide anonymous feedback directly to the professor; and Letters to the Committee on Advancement and Tenure (tan sheets) which are letters to the CAT about the faculty member’s performance, used in evaluating the professor when considering promotions, tenure, and programs to improve performance. Professors may see these upon request, with identifying information redacted.

Most faculty will be using paper forms, but as part of a pilot program started last spring, some senior faculty members will have online evaluation. Though in previous years online evaluation has been done outside of class, this year faculty members have the option to set aside time during class for filling out evaluations online.

In either system, these forms can be finished outside of the allotted time. In addition, letters to the CAT can be submitted at any time.

Q&A with Nigel Nicholson, Dean of the Faculty

What are the benefits you are looking for from the online evaluation?

One set of benefits are, if one doesn’t do it [fill out faculty evaluations] in class, students get to fill in the evaluations when they are ready. That might be at the conclusion of the class, right after exams, rather than at some point in the last two or three weeks. I think it allows the professor to play less of a part in the evaluation process, which can be awkward for both the professor and the students. And it frees up class time.

There are two immediate advantages, even if we give the electronic evaluation in class. One is that the information is much easier for us to read. Some students have lovely handwriting, some have handwriting more like my own, which is not easy to read. And it’s a shame if you spent a lot of time writing and we’re not quite sure what it says.

A second benefit is that the archiving is much better, because, in a sense, you can sort of archive multiple copies. You don’t rely on this one copy [of evaluations] moving around from my files to the evaluation files. That is, I think, particularly good for faculty. They can look back over the evaluations; they get the numbers and the white forms and so on, which can really stack up over time, so if they are coming back to teaching a class they haven’t taught for five years, they can easily access the white forms from five years ago.

The longer term advantage, which I think is a really interesting one, is that the platform gives us different sorts of flexibility. So if we want to change the questions, it’s much easier to do so. If individual professors want to have questions just for themselves—which professors often do now, but they hand out separate feedback sheets—they can do this as part of the system, and that would be a relatively straightforward thing to do. So it increases the kind of options for feedback and it makes the review process easier and the archiving easier.

So either way—whether we do it in class or outside of class—there are some big advantages.

What kinds of feedback have you been getting from professors who have been doing the pilot?

So we’ve only had the one term, and the only feedback we have gathered so far is literally numerical: how many students did it, how many words per tan form were on it, etc. But because we restricted the pilot to senior faculty and senior faculty get reviewed in the spring, we haven’t gotten qualitative feedback on what students said. So right now we are just keeping as objective as possible—what’s the response rate?

There’s no point having a feedback system if the sample size is too small.

In faculty evaluations, what kind of feedback has been helpful?

The feedback that we love is detailed and descriptive. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be evaluative, you know, that I thought this person was a good lecturer or poor lecturer, but what’s really helpful is I thought this person was a good lecturer or a poor lecturer because of these fine things, really fine grained examples, and so on. At that point, it gets really, really helpful.

The other piece that’s really important for us is if students write about the goals of the class. If you think to yourself, “Was this a good class?”, you should also ask yourself “What were the goals of this class?”, and then rate the goals of the class. There exist other questions I think one should consider within that same format: given that the prof went with these goals, what did I think of the textbook, rather than saying I didn’t like the textbook because I wanted a different class. Some of them [classes being evaluated] need to be seen in the framework of the decisions that the instructor has made. I think it’s really helpful having students aware of the larger choices that are made and having them work with that structure.

Some things that are not so helpful: avoid evaluating the professor on things that are not in their control, such as the college’s facilities or personal appearance.

Are there different types of faculty members for which there are different reasons evaluations are helpful?

I think it’s really important to know that all faculty members are reviewed. Depending on those reviews are the regular possibilities of promotion. So, on the one hand, we tend to think that this is really important if you are tenure track—if you are not yet tenured, but will be coming up for tenure at some point. And the fact is, yes, student feedback is really important for those people, but it’s really important for everyone else too.

It’s important for senior faculty because they get reviewed for step promotions. In addition, if one has strongly negative feedback, we can put programs in place to get the faculty member back to where they were when things were going great. So it’s really important both for their careers and for the educational program itself.

And I would say it’s even important for visiting faculty members who might be leaving at the end of the year, that is, who won’t be teaching another Reed class. The feedback is tremendously helpful to them—they will ultimately spend a lot of time with whoever’s [another] dean [of faculty] going over the feedback, because chances are they are going to a different educational job and they are growing and they will learn from student feedback there as well [even at a different institution]. It might not necessarily kick back into our program, though of course it’s always possible someone will come back. But it will really help them in their own professional development. And I would say visitors often do get reappointed: maybe a tenure  track opens up and they might be a candidate for that.

So on the one hand, the tenure decision is in some sense the largest decision academics face, but there are really important decisions being made at the senior level and really important effects on the educational ecosystem in terms of giving feedback and making adjustments, improvements, and so on. I really encourage people not to think “ah so and so is really senior; it doesn’t matter.” I think it does matter on both those levels.

Depending on how this pilot program goes, what is the projected plan for the future?

If it does well, then I think we will transition everybody to electronic evaluations. Presumably a mix of those will be done in class and a mix of them will be done outside of class, up to the professor’s judgement. The trick with doing it in class is everyone needs a device. So it might be true that everyone can bring a device on a given day, but it might also require bringing some laptops in. There are some logistical complexities there, but I don’t think they are insurmountable in any sense. The number of electronic devices is so high that I don’t think we need that much supplement.

But the goal would be to move out of paper into electronic copies for everybody. Right now it only involves a certain number of senior faculty.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I would just like to reiterate that we have a wonderful commitment on the part of the student body to the paper system, and it would be great if we can reproduce that in the electronic version. I also [would like to] thank the students in advance for their continued commitment; it’s an impressive piece of Reed.

Letter from Nigel

What follows is a brief summary of the course evaluation system; please direct any questions about details to friends who have been here longer, to your professors, or to the dean of faculty.

Student evaluation of courses is a crucial part of the system for evaluating faculty members’ performance, and thus a key means for maintaining and improving the quality of our academic program. Students are asked to evaluate each class both quantitatively (bubble sheets with specific questions) and qualitatively (open-ended narrative responses), and this feedback is collected in each faculty member’s evaluation file, and given very serious consideration when the faculty member is evaluated. (There is a third type of feedback that is collected, the “white forms,” but that feedback goes directly to the faculty member and is not part of the evaluation process.) All faculty members, and not simply those coming up for tenure, are regularly evaluated, and reappointment and/or advancement through faculty ranks depends on those evaluations.

This semester we are also continuing a pilot program to test an electronic delivery system for these evaluations, and some of you will be in classes that have signed up for the pilot. There are a variety of advantages to this system (greater flexibility, better archiving, better legibility, the opportunity for professors to ask specific questions, you get to type, and, depending on whether they are done in class or not, increased class time), but every system depends most of all on its response rate, and the quality of the responses, so we are testing the system to see if we can maintain the kind of quality and quantity of responses that we have received under the paper system – so please take the electronic system as seriously as the paper!

Students who are in the pilot classes will receive an email from faculty-evaluation@reed.edu on November 20 directing them to the evaluation system. A link to the faculty evaluations system will also be clearly visible on your IRIS login page. The system mimics the paper system (“bubble sheets,” “white forms,” and the open-ended “tan forms”). You can complete the evaluations at your leisure, but must complete them before the end of the exam period. You can begin them one day and finish them later if you wish. Completed pages will be stored. Some professors will ask you to do these outside of class, some will put aside class time to do the evaluations in class; they will let you know. If you will do them in class, bring a laptop, tablet or smartphone to that class, if you have one; if not, let your professor know, and we will make sure to have one there for you.

One of the wonderful things about Reed students is that you take your responsibility to provide feedback on classes so seriously. Thank you for the feedback you have provided in the past, and thank you for the feedback you will provide in the future.

Nigel Nicholson

Dean of Faculty