The Gray Area | Better course evaluations

Economics tells us that incentives must align with results.

At the end of every semester, Penn students face a necessary exercise that does not fit this basic tenet of human behavior. We are asked to fill out course evaluations for classes that have already ended.

There is no question that these evaluations are valuable. They provide information to future students about particular courses and help professors improve their teaching.

But when I talk to students, they express a common problem. Since the evaluations occur after the course is over, there is no way to see the positive fruits of the 10 to 15 minutes that are taken to fill out each one.

This misalignment results in distortions. Since we know we will never be able to see the positive effects of this feedback, we do not take the evaluations seriously. Even though around 86 percent of students filled out the evaluation last semester, according to the Provost’s office, those numbers do not reflect the quality of the reviews.

The answer to this problem is to come up with an ongoing system of maintaining a dialogue with our professors.

To continue initiatives that have been attempted in the past, the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education — of which I am the chairman — took part in a pilot program in which it evaluated mid-semester teaching assistant performance in professor John DiIulio’s Introduction to American Politics.

SCUE took the results and reported them to DiIulio, who then followed up appropriately. An additional evaluation taken at the end of the semester showed that students felt that this exercise improved performance within the course.

With incentives aligned, mid-semester evaluations simply work.

“The first form served as a better-than-normal occasion for engaging the entire course TA staff, both individually and collectively, in discussions about teaching and how, if at all, to improve,” DiIulio said. “Our one-time experience would be a vote for universalizing the mid-term evaluation.”

However, there is one small problem. Having hand-written midterm evaluations is probably not workable on a large scale. Collating and processing data from a third party by hand simply takes too much time.

“If there’s a way to use technology to our advantage, it would be easier and more people would utilize it,” said Robert Gianchetti, a College sophomore and the SCUE member who administered the program.

That is where the Center for Teaching and Learning comes in. With help from a system being developed by Information Systems and Computing, CTL is currently producing and getting ready to launch an interactive tool called Course Feedback for Instructors.

This system will enable professors to send out feedback forms to their classes by e-mail at any time, with which they will be able to ask anything they want.

This system adds efficiency to the process while also handling any potential negatives. Results will be removed from the system and will not be able to be used for tenure decisions, nor will the responses of students be tracked.

This system will enable a real dialogue between professors, TAs and their students.

For example, at the end of a lecture, the professor will be able to send an e-mail asking what worked and what didn’t and be able to improve the course immediately based on the suggestions.

Anything becomes possible. TAs in dozens of large lecture courses could be evaluated at the mid-semester time period, which could then initiate a follow-up session with the professor or with CTL.

In the past, online mid-semester evaluation forms have been available to professors in the College but have not been used widely.

To make this new system work, faculty need to know about its flexibility as well as the desire of students to participate. It is up to this student-faculty partnership to ensure the success of a program the administration has initiated.

Charles Gray is a Wharton and College junior. His e-mail address is chagr@wharton.upenn.edu. The Gray Area appears every Tuesday.

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