Online course evaluations save universities cash


University of Oregon saw its evaluation submissions more than double last year.

Students at a handful of Oregon campuses are evaluating their professors online, using a system that helps colleges save on reams of paper and gives students an alternative to popular public professor evaluation websites.

Five Oregon schools, including Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, and Southern Oregon University, announced recently that students there would use web-based professor evaluation forms that would only be viewable for students, professors, instructors, and campus administrators.

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The Oregon campuses have cut spending on paper by moving to online evaluations, and keeping the student-written internet ratings off of the public web – including the popular site RateMyProfessor.com – will likely prove popular with faculty, educators said.

The web-based evaluation system is called What-Do-You-Think?, made by CollegeNET, an Oregon-based company providing web-based technologies to colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations.

Keeping students’ praise and criticism of their professors in-house hasn’t been the only advantage in switching to What-Do-You-Think?.

Laura Jacek, the University of Oregon’s assistant registrar for course evaluations, said eliminating Scantron paper evaluation forms formerly used at the 23,000-student school more than doubled the number of submitted student evaluation forms, and saved more than $200,000 in 2010.

The university, using the online evaluation system, collected more than 75,000 online evaluations after the fall 2010 semester, Jacek said. The previous semester – spring 2010 – the school received about 32,000 evaluations using the paper-based system.

“The increase in response means that we have more data to work with, and the data we have is more representative and more reliable,” she said.

Moving to a web-based evaluation helped the University of Oregon streamline the once-complex evaluation process. Campus officials used to print, distribute, collect, and process the tens of thousands of Scantron forms given to students during the final days of their courses, according to a CollegeNET white paper.

Once the massive amounts of paper evaluations were collected and processed, campus department leaders reported difficulty in finding “reports containing the correct subset of information,” according to the white paper.

“Because the Scantron forms were distributed, filled out, and collected during a single class meeting — often a review session — students who chose not to attend that session were excluded from the evaluation process,” the paper said.

The What-Do-You-Think? system is accessible by students anytime, leaving professors and instructors more time to teach their classes and avoid the time-consuming task of handing out and collecting hundreds of Scantron forms.

Professors have long disparaged RateMyProfessor as nothing more than a sounding board for frustrated students publicly airing their grievances and grinding axes in the internet’s anonymous public square.

“I think young people are savvy enough to know that this type of feedback is highly unreliable,” said Aron Goldman, an instructor at the Amherst College Center for Community Engagement in Massachusetts, adding that many RateMyProfessor reviews are just a few words about a professor being a lenient grader or a quiet talker. “It can be entertaining, but that’s about it.”

RateMyProfessor was launched in 1999 as TeacherRatings.com, with a ratings system that lets students give a 1-5 mark to professors and their classes and limits comments to 350 characters or less.

Some educators conceded that high school and college students will use RateMyProfessor and similar websites – such as RateYourProf or ProfessorPerformance – when deciding which campus to attend next fall, just as someone in the market for a new TV would scan consumer sites in search of ratings and customer comments.

“Students hopefully want to have the best experience in class, and I believe they are going to do their research if options are available,” said Aaron Doering, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

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