The university will save more than 4,100 hours of class time every year when student evaluations of their teachers go online, according to the Scanning and Survey Office Web site

Student Evauations of Instructors will move to Buckeye Link at the end of this quarter. The decision came when the committee that oversees the evaluations decided that the online move would save time and money.

Annual costs for the traditional paper forms are estimated at $40,000, not including the payment that goes to staff for administering and processing the forms, which is estimated as high as $100,000.

Richard Gunther, a professor of political science, has been working on the evaluation committee for several years. He said the shift to the Web has been in the works for five years.

“We held off on moving [the evaluations] online because the SIS Web site had not yet been implemented,” Gunther said. “We wanted to wait until students had several years’ exposure to Carmen and other online tools. Only then could SIS be trusted.”

He said the university will save more than a million pieces of paper every quarter now that the paperwork will be eliminated from the process.

The online forms offer more security than the paper forms, which can be lost or damaged, according to the Scanning and Survey Office Web site. The paper forms can also cause wait periods of up to three weeks with printing and scanning issues, mostly because students forget to write with a No. 2 pencil. Now, the data are more likely to be error-free.

Gunther said the quality of the data will also significantly improve.
“Open-ended questions are extremely valuable to faculty,” Gunther said. “We have observed that when students evaluate their professors, their responses are much more detailed online than in class. Online, [they’re] very thoughtful, and [there are] oftentimes extensive essays.”

The move to online evaluations will also benefit instructors in terms of ease and accessibility. Instructors will now be able to download a cumulative summary of their evaluations and student comments from the Internet. Reports will be ready a few days after commencement, which is weeks earlier than has been possible with paper forms.

However, as with any big move, there can be drawbacks.
Gunther said the only concern is short-term: a decline in response rates.

“Research literature has indicated, however, that after one year, rates bounce back up like they were before the switch,” Gunther said. “This is why we have to remind students of the importance of filling out these forms for their instructors.”

Gunther said the student evaluations can help determine tenure and promotion decisions, and instructors take their comments very seriously.

“We had a very broad discussion in the Faculty Council, and the only concern among us was the response rates,” Gunther said.
Gunther said there were proposals from Undergraduate Student Government representatives to withhold grades until they had completed the evaluations, a policy that is used at other universities.

But Gunther and the evaluation oversight committee determined that this might suggest that students are being monitored when they fill out the evaluations.

“Nothing like that will be done. There will be no punishment if you don’t fill it out,” Gunther said. “We just really want students to take this entire enterprise very seriously.”

Gunther said students will receive reminders in Carmen at the end of the quarter to fill out the evaluations. Students who click on the informative link in Carmen will see a message that they are being directed away from Carmen to online evaluations, making it clear that instructors do not have access to see whether students have completed the form.

Gunther said instructors are also encouraged to e-mail their students to remind them. For most Autumn 2009 classes, the activation date for the online evaluations is Nov. 20.