As Spring term draws to a close, many professors will be distributing course evaluation forms, but the forms' lack of standardization is prompting calls from some students and faculty members for an institution-wide assessment system.
The evaluations vary widely across departments and individual professors. In the economics department, for example, only non-tenured economics professors are required to distribute course evaluations, which are used when the department makes decisions about promotion and rehiring visiting professors.
A few departments, though, including chemistry and environmental studies, require tenured faculty to distribute evaluations. But even in these departments, there is no independent assessment. In the chemistry department, where there is a commonly used but non-standard evaluation form, the professor is the only one to see those evaluations.
These practices are drawing criticism, even from the highest levels of leadership in academic departments.
"I personally would very much support mandatory evaluations for all instructors in all departments at Dartmouth," said economics professor and department chair Doug Irwin. "I find it incredible that a Dartmouth-wide system is not in place."
The chemistry department has no system in place to evaluate senior faculty members, department chair Dean Wilcox said. But he attributed the deficiency to a College-wide trend rather than one specific to his department and was careful to stress the chemistry professors' high self-expectations.
"I would say there's a strong culture in our department of being a conscientious and dedicated teacher as well as an outstanding scholar," Wilcox said.
Moreover, he said the evaluations' most important function is to provide individual professors with an outside assessment they can use to inform their teaching.
It isn't just faculty members who are calling for a more standardized system for students to evaluate their professors.
Student Body President-elect Julia Hildreth '05, who ran on a platform which partly sought to standardize the course evaluation process, said students want a more open, extensive system for reviewing courses.
"If students saw the process, they'd be much more likely to take it seriously," Hildreth said.
But, if students are skeptical of the current process, some professors remain skeptical of student responses.
Andrew Friedland, chair of the environmental studies program, called course evaluations just "one of many tools" that professors can use to learn about the effectiveness of their teaching, along with exam performance and feedback from colleagues.
"Course evaluations are a reasonable metric of evaluating teaching in most cases," Friedland said. "However, students are consumers, and like all consumers, students can be swayed by packaging."
Friedland added that class size was one factor that could affect levels of student satisfaction.
Hildreth and the Student Assembly's vice president for academic affairs, Steven Koutsavlis '05, said the Assembly would like an outside body to look at course evaluations and make them public. Such an external review could not occur unless evaluations are standardized, Hildreth said.
Koutsavlis identified the newly created Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning as the body that should look over course evaluations.
But DCAL director Thomas Luxon said there is no chance the center would become part of the course review process, although the center will work with professors on a one-to-one basis to help them improve their teaching. Luxon feared that the center's efforts to help individual professors improve their teaching would be compromised by a perception that DCAL is an extension of the Dean of the Faculty's office.
DCAL's teaching evaluations would not be used in making decisions about tenure, promotion or annual pay increases, because for professors to come to the center for help with their teaching there needs to be a "very, very high confidence in its confidentiality," Luxon said.
On the other hand, Hildreth argued that students would lack confidence in DCAL unless it involved itself in publicly evaluating professors.
But Luxon said he may support a system of uniform course evaluations and that the center would be happy to host discussions on the issue without taking a position. "It's not really the center's job to be taking positions like that," he said.
According to Hildreth, the Assembly will continue pushing for a standardized, public, College-wide course evaluation process.
"If the institution is committed to teaching, the institution should be supportive of the effort," Koutsavlis said.
