Interim Registrar Thomas Bickel announced Monday that beginning this term, the College will launch a two-year pilot program to test electronic class evaluations. Bickel said the evaluations, which are designed to be completely anonymous, have drawn mixed feedback from faculty.
The electronic evaluation is standardized, unlike the previous paper evaluations, which each department wrote on its own. Departments and professors will be able to add their own questions following the standardized ones, though the customized section will not be available until Fall term.
"We have such a large group of courses ... that you really do need to have that kind of flexibility in our system," Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt said.
Folt said that the goal was to create an evaluation that would be easier to use, more flexible and more helpful for faculty. She said that using the internet not only makes the process more confidential but also speeds it up.
"People communicate via the web and use the web more efficiently now than they did even five years ago," Folt said.
Faculty members can take evaluation responses to the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning for help with the feedback.
Faculty response to the new evaluations has been mixed, with some members optimistic about using the internet to get student responses and others more skeptical about its practicality, Folt said.
"I think there's a lot of interest in it and I think there's a lot of reasonable concern," she said.
Folt denied that the electronic evaluations would play a major role in determining faculty salary increases.
"I don't see that as a use of that form. We gather information on their teaching, research and service," Folt said. "This is one part of a comprehensive mix of information that we use."
"I think the concern faculty have is whether we are appropriately assessing the quality of the classroom experience," Folt added.
Students will be required either to complete evaluations for all of their classes or click an "opt-out" button that lets them skip the evaluation, before they can see their grades on Banner Student. While it is possible that students will skip evaluations, Folt said that other schools that use web-based evaluation systems get very high response rates, sometimes as high as 90 percent.
Folt said that professors will still be able to hand out paper copies of evaluations in class as well, and she said that she encourages students to fill out both versions if a professor gives them a paper evaluation.
"That absolutely has to be their discretion to do that," Folt said.
The standardized part of the evaluation contains 23 questions divided into sections about "student background," "course design and effectiveness" and "faculty." Folt said that the Dartmouth Medical School, the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business already use standardized class evaluations.
"It really just unifies the determination that students across all courses will have to provide feedback and assessment," Folt said.
Folt said that a dean's advisory committee made up of the faculty coordinating committee, the head director of DCAL and three to four faculty members will review the pilot program over the next two years. Student feedback will also be taken into account, Folt said.
Staff Writer Jennifer Garfinkel contributed to this story.
