Course Evaluations
Course evaluations can help you and your students! (see samples below)
Please consider offering students in your courses an opportunity to comment on the course. Students consider such an evaluation to be an important feature of a good course. You can use the results of these evaluations to help your students understand the variety of backgrounds and approaches present among the students.
Here are some suggestions about conducting a mid-course evaluation:
- Provide enough time during class (10 minutes or more at the beginning of class) to complete the evaluation; don't assign it as homework or hand it to students on their way out the door.
- Provide questions for students to respond to (see below for examples), not a blank sheet of paper.
- Summarize the results of the midterm evaluations for the class as soon as possible and explain what changes, if any, you plan to make in the class. Then implement those changes. Students benefit from a brief summary of the responses and an explanation of how their feedback might lead to making changes in the second half of a course. Often, student responses will be contradictory ("The math is too hard," "The math is too easy") and it's helpful for students to find out that not everyone is responding to the course in the same way. Students also respect an instructor's explanation of why the course content or style is NOT going to change.
- Be sensitive to individual students' desires for their comments to remain anonymous. (You could ask a department assistant to type the responses before you look at them. Also you could ask a colleague, a mentor, a student observer or someone else to review the evaluations with you).
An easy set of questions that works well is: "What's going well for you in this course? What could be going better? What do you think [professor's name] should do differently? What do you think you and the other students should do differently?" Students also respond well to specific questions, such as "Is the amount of reading assigned for the course manageable?"
The LTC has compiled the following examples of course evaluation forms for you to use or adapt. Unless otherwise noted, all evaluations have come from Carleton faculty.
Midterm Course Evaluations
- Humanities Midterm Evaluation 1 (Microsoft Word 22kB Nov22 10) - unknown Carleton author (18 Apr, 2006)
- Humanities Midterm Evaluation 2 (Microsoft Word 23kB Nov22 10) - unknown Carleton author (18 Apr, 2006)
- Religion 110 Midterm Evaluation (Microsoft Word 50kB Nov22 10) - Rosemary Rader (18 Apr, 2006)
- Humanities Midterm Evaluation (Microsoft Word 20kB Nov22 10) - Louis Newman (18 Apr, 2006)
- English Midterm Evaluation (Microsoft Word 30kB Nov22 10) - Susan Jaret McKinstry (21 Apr, 2006)
- Mid-Course Evaluation (Microsoft Word 26kB Nov22 10) - Louis Newman (27 Jan, 2007)
- Physics 114 Evaluation ( 21kB Nov22 10) - Cindy Blaha (27 Jan, 2007)
- Astronomy 127 Evaluation ( 21kB Nov22 10) - Cindy Blaha (27 Jan, 2007)
End-of-Term Course Evaluations
- General Course Evaluation (Microsoft Word 22kB Nov22 10) - unknown Carleton author (18 Apr, 2006)
- General Course Evaluation (Microsoft Word 20kB Nov22 10) - John Ramsay (Apr 18, 2006)
- Chemistry 234 Evaluation (Microsoft Word 37kB Nov22 10) - J. R. Mohrig (Apr 18, 2006)
- Biology 123 Evaluation (Microsoft Word 36kB Nov22 10) - Susan Singer and Debby Walser-Kuntz (Apr 18, 2006)
- Developmental Botany Evaluation (Microsoft Word 14kB Nov22 10) - Susan Singer (Apr 18, 2006)
- Hebrew Course Evaluation (Microsoft Word 29kB Nov22 10) - Stacy Beckwith (27 Jan, 2007)
- Humanities Course Evaluation (Microsoft Word 40kB Nov22 10) - Louis Newman (27 Jan, 2007)
- Writing Science IDSC 209 Evaluation (Microsoft Word 25kB Nov22 10) - Cindy Blaha (27 Jan, 2007)
- Physics Evaluation (Acrobat (PDF) 168kB Nov22 10) - Alice Thomas and Cindy Blaha (27 Jan, 2007)