Is It Appropriate to Use Class Time for Students to Fill Out Course Evaluations?

Question

At my institution, students are encouraged to complete course evaluations online, yet typically only about one-third participate without additional prompting. Our administration strongly recommends dedicating 15 minutes of class time to these evaluations, but I'm uncertain about this approach. Given that these evaluations are not mandatory, I question the justification of allocating class time to this activity. Is it appropriate to use instructional time for students to fill out course evaluations? What approach would you recommend?

Answer 1

Yes, certainly. At my institution (in the USA), our data shows that you'll get a much higher response rate if you have students fill out the evaluations during class time instead of leaving them to find separate time for it. Partially that's because at the end of the semester the students are very busy and will often put it off until it's too late (for good reasons, it is not allowed for them to fill out evaluations after the final exam).

It sounds like you're unsure if this is a worthwhile use of class time. I argue that it is, for two reasons. First, students filling out evaluations is a chance for them to reflect on the entire semester, including what they perceived to have worked well, and what they perceived to have not worked well. This will involve thinking back over the semester, and thinking of which topics were hard for them. That's an extremely valuable activity for their long term retention of course material, and also a good habit as a way of consolidating knowledge leading into final exams.

Second, having a high response rate is much better for you as the professor. With a low response rate, you don't know if the feedback you're reading is representative of the views of the group as a whole, or just a few squeaky wheels. Also, a higher response rate means more data for you, which means you can improve your teaching for the next group of students. Of course, I don't suggest to do everything that the students say they want on the evaluations, but on average more data is better.

Doing the evaluations in class, my response rate is in the 80-90% range. I use evaluation day as a chance to go over all the things we learned, to get them thinking intentionally about how they best learn (again, this is valuable as they start to think about studying for the final exam), and to refer back to the learning goals that I put on the syllabus, so they can think about how well the course achieved those goals. I think this is a good way to turn evaluations into a learning opportunity, and get students thinking metacognitively about how they learn.

Answer 2

As a counterpoint to the accepted answer: No, possibly not. I'll assume a situation like mine and the OP's, where administration is merely suggesting use of class time for this, and not mandating it. Also, we can stipulate that at a previous time evaluations were necessarily done on paper in the classroom, but now having online evaluations give us other options.

David White makes enticing points in his accepted answer, but in my experience, none of them ring true. Having written many course evaluations myself as a student, at no point did any of them cause me to reflect on the subject matter of the course. I don't think that the questionnaire at our institution has any question likely to cause that; it's entirely about presentation style on the part of the instructor.

More generally, the best research we have is that students are, on average, really bad judges of what counts as effective instruction. Clark et. al. point out that when given a choice in classroom learning strategies, students reliably pick the one from which they learn the least (American Educator Spring 2012). Philip Stark at Berkeley points to multiple randomized studies that likewise show:

These studies confirm the common belief that good teachers can get bad evaluations: Teaching effectiveness, as measured by subsequent performance and career success, is negatively associated with student teaching evaluations...

And this is before even talking about the deep corpus of research that student evaluations of teaching exhibit bias in a number directions, including against women, minorities, harder STEM subjects, those not matching gender stereotypes, etc.

Arguably having the instructor hover over students filling out evaluations is even more likely to input garbage data -- the student may be rushed, or not really have well-thought out opinions, or feel that they can't be honest, etc. I'd actually rather have students motivated by some informed opinion, in a private and deliberate moment, filling these out.

More important than any of that, in my perspective, is that even 15 minutes of lost time for something like this is a loss of irretrievably precious time from the actual subject matter of the course. Some topic would actually have to be cut from my CS classes to make room for something like this. This is emblematic of a larger category of other time sinks also suggested by some parties at my institution -- taking daily attendance records, having certain offices introduce their services (counselors, librarians, accessibility), letting student government members speak, etc. Personally, I resist all of these.

Finally, the online system where I am has a history of failures to work, or a majority of students being unable to log in, so time allocated to the generally failed attempt to use it is an even greater and more frustrating waste.

In short, I skip this suggested use of in-class time, and I haven't had any blowback from that choice. I'm glad that evaluations are now online so we have this flexibility and capacity to focus better on the hard core subject matter in our limited class time.

Answer 3

Course evaluations are a bureaucratic waste of time. The data is useless and never used for anything anyways besides getting a new job or promotion where it's asked for by bureaucrats. Students responses are more predicted by their likely grade and their attraction to their professors than how they felt about the class or what the learned. It's a waste of time online, and certainly shouldn't be done in class. Honestly it shouldn't be done at all, or if it is done it should be done in first half of the term and the scores should be linked to students grades and attendance.