Education & training
Course evaluation survey
Rate the course and the instructor on separate grids, so a weak term says which of the two to repair.
Why this survey gets sent
“The department average was three point nine. The instructor believes the students wanted an easier exam, the students say the exam was not about the course, and the evaluation we used cannot settle it — it asked about both in the same line.”
A course and the person teaching it fail in different ways and are repaired by different people. Split them into two grids and the same ten minutes of a student's time produce two findings instead of one argument — and the workload question, asked against the credit hours, settles a third dispute before it starts.
What is in it
- The course code, and how much of it you attended
- The course itself: aims, order, honesty of the description, value
- The instructor: clarity, preparation, questions, availability, marked work
- Workload against the credit hours (single response)
- Which materials actually helped you learn (multiple choice)
- Whether the assessment tested the course, and whether the marking criteria were known
- What to keep, and the one change (two long answers)
About 6 min to answer
Course evaluation survey
About 6 min
How to write this survey
Rate the course and the teacher apart
The oldest fault in course evaluation is the single scale — “rate this course” — which a student answers about whichever of the two they feel more strongly about. Two grids of five or six statements each cost the student no extra time and produce a diagnosis: a weak course under a strong teacher looks nothing like a strong course under a teacher who never answered a message.
Write the instructor's statements about observable behaviour and never about personality. “Came to each session prepared” and “returned marked work early enough to learn from it” can be agreed or disagreed with by anybody who was in the room; “was enthusiastic” cannot, and it is the line that turns an evaluation into a popularity measure — which is also the line a teacher can most fairly refuse to be judged on.
Measure the workload against the credit hours
Workload is the complaint made most often and measured least often. Asked on its own — “was the workload heavy?” — it collects a mood. Asked against the credit hours it becomes a fact the timetable committee can use: a three-credit course that half the class reports as much heavier than three credits is either over-assigned or badly sequenced, and both are fixable before next term.
Ask about attendance in the same breath and read the two together. A verdict of “much heavier” from students who attended almost everything is a curriculum problem; the same verdict from students who came to fewer than half the sessions is an entirely different conversation. Neither question accuses anybody, as long as the survey carries no name.
Two questions about fairness that can be answered
Fairness is usually asked as “was the assessment fair?”, which means one thing to a student who failed and another to a student who passed. Two narrower questions do the work: did the exams and assignments test what was actually taught, and did you know how your work would be marked before you handed it in. Both have answers a person can give without arguing about their grade.
The second of those changes practice fastest, because its repair is free: publishing the marking criteria alongside the assignment costs an hour once and removes the commonest source of appeals. Ask about the materials in the same breath — a class that says the recordings helped and the set textbook did not has just written next year's reading list.
Anonymity is a promise with a timetable
Anonymity is not a checkbox; it is a set of promises about time. Say on the page that no name is collected, that results are released only after marks, and that the instructor sees a class total rather than individual answers. Students in small groups can still be recognised by a single sentence, so tell them what happens when a section has too few responses to report — the honest answer is usually that nothing is shown at all.
Then keep the promise where everyone can see it. An evaluation run before the final exam and reported the week after it teaches a cohort that the timing is real; one that appears to leak, even once, ends candid answering in that department for years. It is also why no contact field belongs anywhere on this page, however useful a follow-up would be.
Keep one thing, change one thing
Close with two open questions facing opposite ways: what should stay exactly as it is, and the one change that would improve the course most. The first is the question departments never ask, and then wonder why a revision removed the best week of the term. The second, limited to a single change, comes back as a specific sentence instead of a list nobody will act on.
Give the class ten minutes at the end of a session to answer it rather than emailing a link into a revision week. Response rates above two thirds come almost entirely from evaluations answered in the room, and a course evaluation answered by a third of the class is a record of whoever felt strongly — the one set of results guaranteed to describe a term nobody actually had.