The Saint

By Christopher J. Curry

I have waited long to write on this subject, and seeing as I have gotten my first email from Thad Salter I thought it would be important to say a few things regarding course evaluations. 

First, why do we have to do course evaluations? Obviously, one of the goals of these evaluations is to voice the opinions of the students regarding the courses they take and the professors who teach them. But the college also uses these evaluations in its own determination in which classes to offer and to review the competency of their faculty members. 

Second, why is the college so insistent on filling these out? Seeing as to how those who are more motivated to evaluate a class are likely to be one who doesn’t like the class or the faculty member, and are more likely to negatively evaluate the class and teacher, it would be unfair to judge the abilities of the faculty and their classes on just the bad evaluations. To get the overall picture of their faculty, Aquinas College needs to have the biggest sample size it can get. That is why your evaluation of the teacher who was good enough for the gen-ed class you didn’t want to take is supremely important.

The choices in response to each prompt are really going to vary for each student as each student might like class to run differently in one way or another. The really important questions to answer are the rating of the class and the teacher at the end of each section. If we were to equate each option with a grade, it would go as follows.

A: Excellent

B: Good

C: Moderate

D: Fair

F: Poor

Looking at this scale, an institution would aim to have an A-B range professor who has mastery of the material, can clearly convey it, and is excited about the work they do. That means if you think your professor did a moderate job, you would be saying to the institution, essentially, that the professor does not have mastery of the material and should not be a college professor. I think we can all say with certainty that our faculty not only have mastery of the material they teach, but even mastery of the material in other fields.

I would suggest that any critiques or negative comments be left in the comment section at the end of the evaluation, not in the evaluation prompts themselves. Also, feel free to leave positive comments for our faculty. It’s good to hear what people like about you!