Course evaluations at UNC could become public

Course evaluations may soon be redesigned — and the course feedback could become public to all students.

Course evaluations are used as a platform for students to provide feedback to instructors at the end of a course.

James Thompson, associate dean for undergraduate curricula in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the University is interested in changing the course evaluation system, which is used to provide UNC with information about certain classes from students.

“(The questions) are really long and repetitive and tend to ask the same questions in slightly different ways,” Thompson said. “We are getting a return rate that varies from sixty to sixty-two percent.”

Thompson said the present system is currently not public to students and is used by the Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committee to evaluate instructors.

He said the new system would allow students to provide feedback that is then made public in a platform similar to that of ratemyprofessors.com, although it will be based around evaluating courses rather than individual professors.

He said the course evaluation committee does not want to ask questions specifically about instructors because it promotes negative commentary.

“Any platform that aggregates anonymous remarks can get really nasty very quickly,” said Thompson.

He said the ideal system would be similar to how course evaluations are currently instructed, yet the questions would be more specific to the course. He said these reviews could help students when they register for future classes.

Ana Rivera, a junior, said she thinks it would be interesting to see reviews of other classes before taking them.

“You don’t want to take a course when you don’t know anything about it other than the course description,” Rivera said.

Beatriz Vega, a senior, said she thinks the information provided by this new system would be useful to her.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Vega said.

Thompson said the information provided from the course evaluations would be password protected so that anyone who works or studies at UNC could use it.

“We could set up a questionnaire for end of course evaluations that had a set of questions about the course, not about the instructor, and that information could, and we think should, be published,” he said.

Thompson said a report has not yet been given to University administrators, but should be by the end of next month.

“This is an ongoing push by all the people in this unit who administer the course evaluation process,” he said. “We want to see this happen.”

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