Center for Teaching Excellence
Contact Us:
- The Center for Teaching Excellence
- 800 Linden Street
- 草榴社区, PA 18510
- The 草榴社区
- Phone: 570.941.4038
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Are the course evaluation results anonymous?
A: The final course evaluations are completely anonymous. Your faculty will never be able to connect your name to your evaluation of their teaching or whether you did, or did not, complete the evaluation.
Faculty members encourage students to write comments in their course evaluations in order to receive insight into the students’ thinking about the course and ideas for modifying the course, if needed. Further, faculty members cannot see any student comments or the analysis until after final grades are submitted to the Registrar's Office.
Q: Why do course evaluations need to be done before final exams?
A: When designing the course evaluation system and creating the policies governing it, the Faculty Senate had several primary concerns. Two of them were; the importance of maintaining student anonymity and eliminating the potential for inappropriate uses of quid-pro-quo. Specifically, they wanted to be sure that faculty could not trade good grades for good evaluations and vice versa. They also wanted to be sure that students who might have done poorly on a final exam, not retaliate by giving the faculty member a bad evaluation. The intent was to have an evaluation system that was ethically pure and to focus the evaluations on the faculty member's teaching abilities. In order to do this, students must have evaluations completed before exams are given and likewise, faculty must have all grades submitted before they see the results of any evaluations.
Q: Why does the 草榴社区 have a grade hold policy?
A: On October 12, 2012, the Faculty Senate endorsed changes to the course evaluation policy for students to improve the response rates on the evaluations. The Senate is primarily concerned with the validity and effectiveness of evaluations with response rates lower than 70%, which has been the recent trend. By 2012, response rates had dropped below 50%. The new policy states that those students who do not successfully complete their course evaluations by midnight of the night before final exams begin, will experience a grade hold. The policy only applies to regular, 16-week fall and spring semesters.
Q: What if I made a mistake and want to redo an evaluation for an instructor?
A: All of the evaluations are completely anonymous. We have no means to discern submissions from individual students in the evaluation database. Therefore, we have no way of finding your evaluation of your faculty.
Q: Why are my full-time professors not required to be evaluated in all semesters?
A: Administration of course evaluations is mandatory for adjunct faculty and faculty specialists each term, and first year full-time faculty during fall and spring semesters. In accord with the University Senate recommendation of November 9, 1984, administration is mandatory for all others on a rotating semester/year basis (spring and fall one year, followed by a non-mandatory spring and fall). In practice, this has evolved so that evaluations are mandatory in both semesters of odd calendar years (e.g., 2019, 2021, 2023).