Online Evaluations

In the spring we took the plunge and converted our end-of-term student evaluations from paper to electronic. We used the identical form otherwise--that was the only change. Looking at the results, it's obvious that the distribution of scores changed dramatically. The graphs below show the histograms for section averages. The number of sections is around 250 in each.

The bottom two are from paper distribution. The top one is the electronic, and shows a bell-shaped curve with a big spike in the middle. I assume that there are a lot of students who just bubble in 4s all the way down the sheet. That would explain the middle of the graph. But why would the skew in the paper version practically vanish online?

Grades and Evaluations

More than a decade ago, I found myself newly minted as a department chair. When it came time to do annual evaluations of faculty (all of whom were more senior than I), I sweated bullets over it. I tried to systematize it as much as possible in the name of objectivity. Whether I was successful or not is questionable, but I survived without a mutiny at least. One of the indicators I looked at was grades assigned versus evaluations received. I made a scatterplot of the two variables and looked for outliers. This had to be done by hand, laboriously typing in numbers from printed pages.

Flash forward to the present, where I built an electronic system to store evaluations. Mass comparisons are now only a few queries away. I finally got around to doing this a couple of weeks ago, and the result is shown below.

The student ratings for "The instructor appears knowledgeable and competent in the field" appear on the left, with 1 = strongly agree and 5 = strongly disagree. The bottom axis is grade point average on a four point scale. Each dot represents one faculty member (with at least 100 ratings). Although there is a bit of tendency for higher grades to go with better ratings, the correlation is pretty low at -.22. There is an obvious ceiling effect at the bottom of the graph. Many students are giving top ratings across the board.

I expected the correlation to be considerably more significant. The good news is that I was wrong--grades don't seem to be being given away in order to get good evaluations.