Each year, students at Ball State University fill out more than 100,000 teaching evaluations, according to University Computing Services, which is responsible for processing the evaluations and sending the results to professors.
University policy currently requires each teacher be evaluated by students in at least one course each semester.
Student Government Association passed a resolution in December 2008 urging the university to change the policy so every professor would be evaluated in each class every semester. The resolution went to the University Senate Agenda Committee, who sent it to the Teaching Evaluation Committee of Faculty Council.
The Teaching Evaluation Committee said it believed the minimum of one course per year was sufficient until there was "consistency across campus in the evaluation instruments."
This effectively killed the resolution, Frank Hood, former SGA president and current university senator, said in an Daily News column Wednesday.
At Thursday's senate meeting, Hood moved to have senate reconsider the SGA resolution. After discussion, the senate decided to send the resolution back to the Teaching Evaluation Committee to reconsider it. The committee is supposed to report back by December.
Hood said he wanted to make sure senators understood the student side of the issue and not just the opinion of a committee that spent one meeting discussing it after we spent almost a year on the issue.
As SGA president, Hood could appoint a graduate and an undergraduate student to the committee, according to the Faculty and Professional Personnel Handbook. Hood said the graduate seat is occupied. He said more than 100 student seats are available on University Senate councils and committees for SGA to fill. He has never heard of anyone filling all of the seats. Current SGA President Beth Cahill said she would make filling the seats on the committee a priority.
Shaheen Borna, member of the Teaching Evaluation Committee, said it thought improving the evaluations was important before making them mandatory for each class.
The evaluations "are neither valid nor reliable," Borna said. "Increasing the frequency [of] use of an invalid and unreliable instrument is not going to do anything."
In research, an instrument is considered valid if it is measuring what it is supposed to measure and is considered reliable if measurements are accurate, Borna said.
"These instruments are impression management," Borna said, "A faculty member can manage the impressions of students and get very good evaluations."
This damages the evaluation's validity because the questions measure student's opinions of the teacher, rather than the concepts that the questions intend to measure, he said.
This makes using the evaluations to improve methods harder for teachers because they don't know what is causing students to answer a question a certain way, Borna said. If a professor acts on invalid statistics, "it's going to do more harm than good."
Borna said to make the evaluations reliable and valid, the concepts on the evaluation, like availability and fairness, must be clearly defined. To operationalize the concept of availability, the evaluation might ask if the faculty member was available during office hours and if he or she responded to e-mails, Borna said.
He suggested each department set up a committee to create a valid and reliable evaluation form for its department.
Teaching Evaluation Committee Secretary Carol Friesen said Hood's column made her mad. She said she was offended Hood said members of the committee don't care about students.
Friesen said the committee cares about student concerns but it has more pressing issues to make sure the evaluations reflect them.
"The Teacher Evaluation Committee, I believe, is totally in support of changing that policy, but we decided until there is consistency across campus in policy and in procedure ... it doesn't make any sense to make students waste your time because unfortunately for many people, that's what it would be ... " she said.
Friesen said she understands students want action, but the committee must move slowly to improve the process.
The committee must evaluate one-third of departments on a revolving basis, Friesen said. Over the course of three years, every department's policy is evaluated. In past years, the committee did not do this, she said. The committee is under new leadership, she said, and is starting again. Many department chairs have not responded to the committee's requests for information, she said.
"It's frustrating when you feel like you spent a whole year on a project and we still don't have in our hands the policies and procedures that are used," she said.
Friesen said the most important thing is to make sure the evaluations are used to improve teaching quality.
"There is no guarantee today, unless you're in the tenure system, that anybody is ever going to see those results except maybe your boss. And that is the thing I think students just don't understand," she said.
She said the committee is a "champion" of the students.
"If you as the students think we're wrong, we need to know," Friesen said.
Current system
- More than 100,000 student evaluations are filled out every year.
- Evaluations for every class are not mandatory; each professor must be evaluated in at least one class every year.
- The Teaching Evaluation Committee is required to evaluate a third of the departments every year on a revolving basis. In the past few years, it hasn't done this but is under new leadership and plans to begin again.
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