Student Course Opinion Survey
Student feedback is one of the most effective and established means of improving teaching practices in an educational institution. The purpose of the survey is to receive candid feedback from the students about the quality of classroom instructions, student learning, and student performance assessment. In addition to teaching effectiveness, the survey is also meant to assess the relevance of course content to achievement of the overall Program Objectives and Student Learning Outcomes. To get best results, this survey should be conducted for all subjects taught every semester. The results of the survey will be used in the following ways:
- The teachers can review the survey results for their own classes and ensure that they retain the strengths and address the weaknesses by making positive changes. Improvements are expected from the first time a teacher teaches a class or the first time the course is taught to the subsequent offerings of the class. Also, if major topical changes or pedagogical changes are introduced, the impact of those changes can be assessed through course opinion survey results.
- The Deans, Department Heads and Program Coordinators can assess the value of certain course to the overall Program Objectives and desired student outcomes. A course taught by multiple instructors but uniformly receiving negative evaluations from students must be critically evaluated for relevance and/or targeted interventions to turn it around.
- Survey results provide the department heads and deans valuable input for assessing faculty member’s effectiveness as a teacher in the class room for the purposes of annual evaluations.
While using the results of the course opinion survey as mentioned above, it is important to be aware of some limitations to avoid quick judgments. It is well known that numerical ratings received for measuring effectiveness tend to generally be high for small classes, for elective courses and for post-graduate courses. On the contrary, the numerical ratings are generally lower for courses with high enrollments, courses that required as part of the curriculum and for lower-division undergraduate classes. Thus, use of the survey results to measure teacher effectiveness across disciplines or even across faculty in the same discipline should be done with caution.
Effective surveys are brief that can be completed by the students in 10 minutes or less and must also contain an open section in which students can write unsolicited comments. Student responses must be anonymous and during the time the students are completing the survey, the teacher must not be present in class to avoid any perception of teacher influence on the results. The results of the survey must be held in strict confidence and should only be divulged on a “need to know” basis. In some universities only the instructor of the class has access to unsolicited student comments while in others the department head also has access to the comments.