At the end of each semester, Syracuse University students are asked to evaluate their courses and professors. While the process may seem tedious, department chairs said they find the surveys useful.

The student ratings are consistent and there is a high correlation between students’ ratings of the amount learned in a particular course and their overall ratings of the course’s instructor, according to the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment’s website. The assessment of a professor is more representative of the professor’s overall effectiveness when student ratings are used in combination with other evidence, according to the website.

James Tsao, chair of the advertising department in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said while the survey is not a perfect measurement, it is a critical tool on teaching performance.

“It is an useful instrument to measure students’ perception of course content, teaching formats and lecturer styles,” Tsao said in an email. “Most importantly, it is an effective method to collect students suggestions that could be used to enhance teaching effectiveness if the same course will be taught again.”

Rochelle Ford, chair of the public relations department in Newhouse, said the course evaluation is useful for promotion and tenure consideration.

The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment declined to comment for this story.

Ravi Shukla, chair of the finance department in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said student comments are especially important pieces of information.

“As a professor, they inform me about what is working well and what needs to be changed or improved,” Shukla said in an email. “As a department chair, the teaching evaluations shed light on not only how effective a professor is but what makes the professor effective.”

Shukla added that survey results may be shared among faculty to improve the quality of classes.

“If I notice certain patterns or common issues in the course evaluations across faculty members in my department, I can highlight them in my communications with the faculty which might help them all become more effective,” Shukla said.

Shukla said the response rate from students decreased when the university introduced online teaching evaluation. Still, he said students’ assessment on faculty has not changed considerably.

Alan Middleton, chair of the physics department in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the course survey is vital for the department in determining what is working.

“There is other information, but student ratings and comments are useful and do often strongly affect how we teach our courses, both as individual professors and as a department,” Middleton said in an email.

Middleton added that the department did not find a significant difference in response rate between the paper and online surveys.

“We get somewhat fewer responses online than with paper and the numerical ratings for the same professor are similar,” he said.

Published on April 27, 2015 at 11:33 pm

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