Student Course Evaluation Survey

The purpose of the Midterm and End-of-Term course evaluation survey is to provide instructors with student feedback on their courses. This survey should not be used to inform personnel decisions affecting faculty unless this use is agreed upon by the faculty in a given academic department.

  • Surveys are conducted regularly during each semester. 
  • The following types of courses are intentionally excluded from the survey:  Law and Design courses, Thesis, Independent Study, and Internship courses, ROTC courses. 
  • Students receive an email containing a link to the survey landing page.  The landing page, in turn, contains links to the survey for each course in which the student is enrolled during the current semester.  There is also a link to the student survey landing page in the Tools area of Blackboard. 
  • The Midterm Survey launches in the 6th week of the semester and is available to students for 2 weeks. The midterm survey is considered to be formative assessment. Therefore, instructors are encouraged to talk to their students about their interest in student feedback and their plans to use this feedback to improve both their course and their teaching effectiveness.  The results are available to course instructors in the Qualtrics IIT Course Evaluations dashboard as soon as the survey is made available to students. 
  • The End-of-term survey is available to students two weeks before final exams and remains available to students up until final exams begin. Results are also available to instructors after final grades have been submitted.  
  • The Summer Survey launches the week before final exams in the first summer session and is available to students until one week after final exams in the last summer session. Results are available to instructors after final grades have been submitted for the last summer session.

At present, Illinois Tech uses just four survey questions: two questions about the course and two about the instructor.  The first question asks the student to rate either the course or instructor on a 5-point scale, and the second asks whether the student would like to enter any comments about the course or instructor.  

The course and the instructor questions are contained in separate survey forms in Qualtrics to enable students to evaluate each course instructor separately.  This separation of course and instructor questions is invisible to students, however, who are first asked the two questions about the course, followed by the questions about the course instructor, which are repeated for each instructor if the course has more than one instructor. 

Since Fall 2020, the Student Evaluation Survey has been conducted in Qualtrics, a survey platform. The data collected from students is displayed in the IIT Course Evaluation Dashboard in Qualtrics. 

How instructors access the IIT Course Evaluation Dashboard

  • Log into Blackboard
  • Click on "Institution Page" on the menu
  • Click on "Course Evaluation Dashboard" in the survey module

OR

  • Log into the MyIIT portal at https://my.iit.edu/
  • Click on the "Teaching" tab
  • Click on the Faculty Dashboard
  • Click on the Course Evaluations link

Due to changes in the survey platform over time, data from past semesters is found on the platform in use at that time.  Those seeking data from past semesters should consult the table below to identify the location of the data.

Year

Term

Survey

Location

< 2018

Fall

End-of-Term

Cognos (available from CLI on request)

2019

Spring

Midterm

Course site in Blackboard

2019

Spring

End-of-Term

Course site in Blackboard

2019

Fall

End-of-Term

Cognos (available from CLI on request)

2020

Spring

Midterm

Course site in Blackboard

2020

Spring

End-of-Term

Blackboard (available from CLI on request)

2020

Fall

End-of-Term

IIT Course Evaluation Dashboard in Qualtrics

A growing body of literature suggests that the use of student evaluations of teaching for personnel decisions regarding faculty is problematic. Specifically, these evaluations have been found to be influenced by a host of course characteristics unrelated to teaching effectiveness, such as the time of day the course meets, the subject, class size, whether the course is required, and the gender of the instructor (Feldman, 1978, 1979, 1984, 1992, 1993; Kember & Leung, 2011). Moreover, student course evaluations have been found to be only weakly correlated with other measures of teaching effectiveness and student learning (Boring, Ottoboni & Stark, 2016; Uttl, White & Gonzalez, 2017).

Therefore, academic departments should use a peer assessment process to evaluate faculty teaching performance. This process can include a statement of teaching philosophy, course syllabi review, peer observations of teaching performance using a rubric developed for this purpose, and self reflections on course evaluation results from the student survey. Each academic department is free to design their own process. Also, CLI staff are available to consult with departments who would like our help in developing a process.