by Spencer Goodson

Course evaluations are a habitual part of the end of every semester. Some students fill them out in great detail, others neglect to even open the website, CourseEvalUM. Course evaluations don’t just go to professors, they often end in the hands of college administrators and can impact how a class looks in future semesters. 

“Student feedback is critical and something that we value incredibly,” said Josh Madden, the assistant dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “If there was an adjunct teaching for the first time ever or a faculty member who’s been teaching for 30 years, we put the same level of attention on the feedback and try to make sure that we’re delivering the experience that we want to be.”

Madden explained that professors, senior Merrill administrators, the dean and assistant deans look at every evaluation and discuss with the instructor. If feedback is consistently negative, Madden said, the conversations center around what needs to be improved. 

For adjunct faculty the situation is more intense: Madden said student feedback can play a part in whether an adjunct is brought back for future semesters. 

Similar weight is put on the evaluations in other colleges, according to interviews with administrators.

“I make the decisions about retaining adjunct faculty members or not, and I have access to all of the evaluations,” said Kate Izsak, the associate dean for academic affairs for the College of Information Sciences. 

“Typically, if someone has under an average of two for a course, and maybe a little higher, we would take that as a reason to look a little deeper,” she said.

Administrators take the evaluations with a grain of salt, factoring in common biases, she added. Instructors at the iSchool are assigned a peer mentor to address the feedback — whether that means changing course material or developing new teaching skills. 

Bethany Swain, a senior lecturer at Merrill, said she looks at her evaluations in the grand scheme of things. 

“It is one data point,” Swain said. “The students who fill them out are the ones that are motivated to do so” — either because they loved or hated the course. 

She said she tries to get a more representative view of everything by setting up an anonymous poll halfway through the semester to gather feedback on her class.

Chika Onyenezi, a graduate assistant at UMD’s Department of English, said the course evaluations are extremely important to him.

“I’m just concerned about the students and that they receive what I’m teaching,” he said. “I want them to leave my class with that kind of satisfaction.”

It’s important to him that students aren’t pushed to fill out the evaluations — “I want them to do it because they want to do it,” he said.

Julia Glasgow, a junior marketing and operations management major and business statistics teaching assistant, said course evaluations are informative — especially for those that don’t want to give feedback in-person. 

“Sometimes you don’t necessarily realize how things come across on the other side,” Glasgow said.

Hannah Nolan, a PhD student and third-semester graduate assistant for the History Department, said that she now looks forward to seeing evaluations at the end of the semester — even though she hated doing them as an undergraduate student.

“Part of being a [history] grad student is being trained to be a professor in the future,” Nolan said. The evaluations help her understand what she’s doing well or what can help her in future classes, she added.

“You don’t want to be a terrible professor, so even negative feedback is still good.”   

Featured image: The CourseEvalUM website.