As the semester is coming to an end I just wanted to remind students to fill out the online course evaluations. It may seem like a drag but it does not really take that much time at all to answer the questions and this system has been essentially designed to give students the opportunity to offer feedback about courses, professors and what changes they would like to be implemented. These evaluations are also really important for professors who are being considered for tenure and job promotions and can very well determine whether or not they will continue teaching at QC so please participate for their sake.
Below is the link to the website so start evaluating your courses now:
https://apps.qc.cuny.edu/courseevaluation
In the past QC has relied on paper evaluations but that process was really time-consuming and expensive so the school switched to an online system. Unfortunately there has been a very low turn out on student responses. The school has tried to offer incentives to encourage the student body to participate such as raffle prizes from iPods to laptops and parking deals. I also heard from my biology professor recently that those students who do fill out their evaluations will receive their semester grades earlier than those who don’t. I am not sure if that is just a departmental thing but it certainly sounds like a good plan and hopefully it will compel more students to fill out the online evaluations. If anybody thinks of some better incentives feel free to share them here. I know that I would really appreciate getting some more printing money for the course evaluations I complete because that would be a guaranteed monetary incentive, but maybe that’s because I am an English major and $10.00 a semester is definitely not enough for printing out 15-30 pg long readings.
Another incentive of completing these online evaluations that I don’t think many students are aware of is that all of this data is being entered into the Queens College Course Information System (http://courses.qc.cuny.edu), a database open to students to check out the evaluation results. I know that in the past I sometimes turned to ratemyprofessors.com to determine which courses to take but as open website you do not really know who is posting and whether that information is even reliable. I have definitely been screwed over a couple of times by relying on those comments. On the contrary, the QC database is a closed system only open to QC students and even more importantly, students who have taken the specific classes and professors they are rating. I think that this is will become an amazing resource for students and even faculty in evaluating professors for jobs and promotions, if only more people decide to get involved. But aside from a lack of publicity, another weakness of the site is that it does not incorporate written comments from the students. I think that those comments are really important and even more helpful than the statistical averages because they convey students’ impressions of courses and professors much more clearly. Therefore, that sort of information should also be available to the student body.
These are only a few suggestions that I had with regards to improving the online course evaluations system but I strongly encourage others to share their own thoughts and ideas. ^^
