By JULIE M. BRADFORD
Whether they seek to praise or criticize, students anticipate teacher and course evaluations at the end of every semester at BYU. The format for those evaluations could change for students' benefit.
'If teacher and course evaluations were placed on the Internet for students to complete, then the information could be accessible for other students when registering for classes,' said James Fitzgerald, Student Advisory Council representative for Student Life during the 1996-1997 school year.
Only some teachers and classes are evaluated at the end of the semester. The recent self study completed at BYU suggested that every teacher and every class needed to be evaluated each semester by the students.
In January, BYU administration commissioned a group of administrators, faculty members and students to form a committee to analyze the best method of rating every course and every teacher every semester.
The committee then created a pilot program to determine the success of placing the evaluations on the Internet. In this experiment during Winter Semester 1997, 47 classes were chosen to participate.
In each class students were encouraged to evaluate their teachers and courses on the Internet on a kiosk computer, an on-campus lab computer or any computer with Internet or web access.
'It would be basically impossible to do these complete evaluations by paper, because of the expense,' said Fitzgerald, who is on the committee. 'The only feasible option would be to do it on the Internet.'
'We made six forms, to determine which form would be the most user-friendly for the students,' Fitzgerald said. 'We experimented with freshman to upper-level classes from every college, small and big, to see if the form fit every setting.'
In this experiment, half of the classes were just encouraged to complete the evaluation and the other half were required to complete the evaluations to avoid a registration hold.
'If we mandate this to get a statistically good report, then what would be the punishment?' Fitzgerald said. 'We needed encouragement to avoid a statistically-biased report.'
The concern was that only the most highly-motivated students with either extremely positive or negative comments would do the evaluation causing the evaluations to be unbalanced, said Paul Evans, assistant professor of zoology.
'However, it is necessary to let every student evaluate the faculty and course to get a fair and accurate survey,' Fitzgerald said.
Evans' concern is that students' comments on the evaluations are not seen as making a difference.
In the past, students have not received the benefit from these evaluations. But if the information is available to all students, then students will see a visible benefit, Fitzgerald said.
'It makes sense that if it is required, then we should have access to the information,' Fitzgerald said.
Vanessa Siggard, a junior from Agoura, Calif., majoring in pre-veterinary medicine, completed the evaluations on the Internet for her Biology 130 and Animal Science 410 classes.
'After we were told we had to complete the evaluation on the Internet, I went out as soon as class was done and went to a kiosk computer,' Siggard said. 'It was user-friendly, very easy and it wasn't very detailed.'
Lee Hendrix, a statistics faculty member on the committee, said that after the data from the experiment is analyzed, a proposal will be submitted to the administration.
'From the experiment we did this winter we will determine what proportion of the students filled out the evaluation without coercion and what portion did with coercion,' Hendrix said. 'The administration will want a good representation of student responses in each class.'
The Internet version is the one that every class each semester will be evaluated by every student. That is the goal, Hendrix said.u