In the final weeks of each semester, Tufts students expect a familiar email in their inboxes, urgently inviting them to click on a link and complete their course evaluations. In return for completing the evaluation, students receive early access to their unofficial transcripts, allowing them to see their grades prior to the grading deadline. For most, however, the process that occurs after submitting their course evaluations remains largely unknown, along with the evaluations' impact on faculty.
To shed light on these unknown processes, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences James Glaser described the purpose and life cycle of a course evaluation for both students and faculty.
“Course evaluations give faculty feedback on the effectiveness of their pedagogy, on the resonance of their syllabus ... and on their modes of evaluating students,”Glaser said. “It allows faculty to allow students to express their opinions on things that worked and don't work.”
Glaser explained that course evaluations are processed by technology from the moment of submission. Faculty members do not have access to their evaluation feedback until final grades are submitted.
Student comments are relevant not only in making recommendations for instructors to improve their teaching but also in tenure and promotion processes, Glaser explained. However, he added that individual evaluations are not the only relevant criterion.
“No one course evaluation is going to make a difference ... patterns [are] what we're looking for in the course evaluation,” Glaser said. “If we see patterns of concern and they're consistent, then it allows us to approach the faculty member and try to address the problem.”
Glaser listed faculty course visits, letters from the mentees of faculty and writings from faculty members about their teaching philosophy as other assessment tools used during the semester and in tenure and promotion.
On the student end of the course evaluation continuum, sophomore Niki Karra expressed her take on the benefit of course evaluations.
“I think course evaluations can be really helpful for departments just because they give the professors a sense of how the students in the class are feeling, which, ... especially in big lectures, can be sort of hard to gauge,”Karra said.
Senior Emilia Cottignoli shared that while she appreciates course evaluations as an opportunity to reflect on her coursework, she is not sure about their ability to bring about meaningful changes to the curriculum.
"I just am not sure how effective they are in affecting change that you might want to see with the professor or with the class structure in general,” Cottignoli said.
At face value, course evaluations allow professors to incorporate feedback and prepare for future semesters — but there are limitations to their application. As Keith Maddox, associate professor of psychology, points out, course feedback often consists of extremes.
“The idea is that you get really detailed descriptions from students who are particularly ... influenced or passionate about the course and then … other people who just didn't like it or didn't enjoy it at all,”Maddox said.
The value of course evaluations is further restricted when they are influenced by biases and stereotypes. As a 2018 The Washington Post article by Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, points out, the personal biases of respondents often leak into course evaluations.
Drezner refers to a study of course evaluations that revealed that female instructors were more often called “teacher” than “professor” than male instructors were. It also found that student feedback of female professors often incorporated evaluations of the professors' personalities, appearance and perceived intelligence — criteria that were not included in assessments of their male counterparts. The influence of biases on feedback is especially concerning when one considers the potential impact for course evaluations on systematically marginalized groups.
“We know that course evaluations overwhelmingly privilege those who are already privileged — so white, cis-het, male instructors, tend to be evaluated more highly than those who are marginalized across any axis,” Shameka Powell, assistant professor and co-director of educational studies, said. “For that reason, I would suggest that course evaluations are limited in addressing all of the issues that we expect an evaluation to address."
Powell also spoke about the impact of context on course evaluations with respect to course content.
“I talk about race, racism, inequality, all as it intersects with schooling," Powell said. "On a macroscopic level, versus an individual [level], [students think], ‘I worked really hard. I deserve to be here. How dare Dr. Powell will talk about structures of inequality that may have benefited me? I'm not happy, I'm going to mark them down on their evaluation.'"
Powell called for a reexamination of the power of course evaluations and to question whether they are used for “punitive measures," or rather motivated by “formative growth."
In light of recent discoveries and discussions, Glaser shared that the university is currently conducting an internal study into Tufts' course evaluations. He also said that the evaluation form was designed with the intent of selecting questions that would be less likely to make room for bias in responses. When asked about how questions were constructed to intentionally minimize the appearance of bias, Dean Glaser explained that they were “less general [and] more specific; they’re about learning [in the classroom]."
In a 2015op-ed published in The Tufts Daily, former Tufts student Kyle Allen made a plea for the administration to make evaluation feedback accessible to students while registering for classes, only if they filled out the prior semester’s evaluations. Allen argued that it would enable students to make more informed choices about their course selection. That wish had previously been granted in 2006, when the TCU Senate initiative granted student access to data from fall 2005 course evaluations.
A request for publicly available data has not made its way into a TCU Senate resolution in recent semesters — perhaps partly due to the intensive work required to display the data by a member of student government, according to Glaser. While publishing written feedback has not been up for consideration, Karra expressed concern about discriminatory beliefs presenting themselves in numerical data as well.
“I feel like that could get very biased very quickly," Karra said. "[I] feel like [publishing numerical data] could do more harm than good."
Cottignoli mentioned that one change she would make to the course evaluations process would be adjusting the submission deadline for students.
“[Course evaluations are requested] smack dab in the middle of finals,”Cottignoli said. “I feel like after I've submitted everything, after I've determined what my final grade is, ... I can articulate my thoughts better.”
Even in the absence of course evaluation data, students are not completely without resources to prepare for a semester with new courses and professors. To Powell, making course evaluation data accessible isn’t as effective as the informal systems currently in place.
“You will always get more honest feedback from your peers than you would ever get an evaluation form," Powell said. "And in many regards, that's because evaluation forms, as surveys, create a boundary to a type of question. … There's little room for elaboration."
