Last fall students completed more than 84,000 course evaluations in the new CourseEvalUM system, about 63 percent of the nearly 135,000 possible evaluations. Most colleges had a 61 percent or better evaluation return rate with three achieving more than 70 percent return and no college falling under 53 percent. It is hoped that student familiarity with the system, planned improvements, and continued faculty support to encourage student participation will push the return rate even higher.

CourseEvalUM results for faculty members and administrators were posted in early February for fall 2007 courses. Once the system is fully developed, the reports will be posted as soon as the university’s electronic grade submission deadline passes.

Faculty members have access to the reports through ARES under Faculty Services and through a link in the “What’s New” bar. Individual course reports are provided for each instructor, including both the administrative and student items. Administrators have access to the administrative items for each course as well as summary reports for their units.

Students can see a portion of the results, the student-view items, using their access link at Testudo. This semester, in order to promote interest in the system and greater student participation, all registered students have been granted access to the student report pages. However, starting with results for this spring’s evaluations, only students who have completed all of their CourseEvalUM surveys will be given the privilege of seeing the results.

Because the university will publish only statistically valid results, a course’s evaluation results are available to students only if 70 percent or more of its enrolled students evaluated it. The fall evaluations resulted in about one-third of university courses having their CourseEvalUM results available for student viewing. Report availability for faculty and administrators does not depend on the number of student evaluations completed.

The reports have been well received so far, though users have also suggested enhancements to the system. “As the basic systems are being established for both collecting and reporting the data, we are working to incorporate fundamental elements as well as requested enhancements,” said Renee Baird Snyder, Coordinator for CourseEvalUM in the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment. She continued, “For now, we are taking feedback and trying to find ways to incorporate the most pressing requests over the course of the next couple of semesters, depending on the scope of the request and the expressed need for it from around campus.”

This spring, the CourseEvalUM system will open on Tuesday, April 29 and close at the end of the day on Study Day, Wednesday, May 14. At this writing, the CourseEvalUM planning team anticipates that the system will be able to accommodate evaluating more than one instructor per course as needed. Also expected this term within three colleges — the R.H. Smith School of Business, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the A. James Clark School of Engineering — a pilot will take place to collect data using the current university-level items and additional college-determined items. Future semesters will test the addition of department-level items and instructor-determined items.