OUR VIEW
A proposal will be made at USU shortly concerning teacher evaluations. We all know what they look like: the two-sided, blue bubble sheets with a million questions to answer. A shortened version of this teacher evaluation form will be proposed by the Faculty Evaluation Committee to the Faculty Senate. They want to have fewer questions, mostly because a majority of USU professors think the current forms are too long.
And we agree.
Sure, the 15-minute break from a class lecture to fill out evaluations is great for students, but the Faculty Evaluation Committee is right about needing a change to the length of the evaluation. If the new form is put into effect, students will have to answer only 10 questions. Less is best, we say.
This isn’t the only change they want to make either. In addition to a shorter evaluation, they want to move the evaluation from a paper deal to an online form that students will have to fill out at a later time.
As far as making the option for evaluations move to the online world, there are only a few die-hard students that would wait in line for a computer at the TSC computer lab to fill out an online teacher evaluation form. If it’s not required and not done in class, most students will either forget about filling it out or decide it’s not worth their time to do so. Let’s be honest, the minute students step off campus, professors are the last thing they want to think about, unless they have something to gripe about. That being the case, the online evaluations would likely attract only those students who want to “stick it to the man” in the only way possible at this university.
The University of Utah won’t let a student see their final grades until their teacher evalutations have been completed online. While this may be a solution to the problem, let’s not get too demanding. Since when did we ever want to be like the U?
The best solution, if professors want an accurate and honest evaluation, is to shorten the form and give it to students during class time at the end of the semester. This way the thing gets filled out, teachers get evaluated and students still get a chance to get out of a few minutes of class.