A student fills out a course evaluation form. University of Maryland officials are pushing to improve response rates for course evaluations.
As the semester comes to an end, University of Maryland officials are pushing students to complete course evaluations despite low response rates in past semesters.
More than 6,200 course evaluations were made available Monday. Renee Baird Snyder, course evaluations coordinator for the Office of Institutional Research Planning and Assessment, said response rates for evaluations are typically around 63 percent.
However, this past spring, response rates fell below 60 percent, which Snyder said is concerning. The decrease came despite the implementation in summer 2014 of a commercial course evaluations system compatible with some mobile devices, which Snyder said she hopes will increase response rates.
“We hope that mobile functionality and increased student understanding of why evaluations are important will help us to continue to improve our response rate — and hopefully the quality of feedback,” she said. “Thoughtful, constructive, specific feedback is most useful.”
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Robert Infantino, associate dean of the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college, said the mobile functionality could give professors the option of having students complete their evaluations during a designated time in class.
While he recognizes the value of summative feedback at the end of a course, Infantino said periodic evaluations throughout the semester could be much more useful to students.
“In a sense, I can understand why students don’t participate as much, because it’s not really going to have any benefit directly to them,” Infantino said. “It’s going to benefit the next generation.”
Since switching to the new system, the university has had to address some issues, including making reports from the evaluations available to students.
Additionally, Snyder said, upgrading the operating system will allow the university to update enrollments after the start of the term to more accurately reflect course rosters closer to evaluation time.
Shabnam Ahmed, the Student Government Association’s vice president of academic affairs, has been working with Snyder to implement changes to system. Until these changes come, she said, it is still important that students complete the evaluations, despite the system’s kinks.
“The biggest thing that’s on the radar for the administration, in terms of course evaluations, is just to get students to do them,” she said. “If everyone did their evaluations, then we would have evaluations to look at and a large database of very sufficient data.”
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A student can only view evaluation information for a course if 70 percent of students in the previous class completed the evaluation. Ahmed is working with the university to lower that threshold.
However, Ahmed and Infantino said lowering that number too much might remove some of the value of having the large, representative sample a 70 percent response rate would provide.
“Going from 70 to 60 percent — I don’t think I would have any qualms with that,” Infantino said. “If we lowered it to 50 percent just to get that threshold up, it could have the downside effect of … less feedback for the faculty members.”
