As the Fall semester comes to a close students look forward to their future winter break, welcome the start of a new season, and prepare for their class finals and give one more push toward that final grade.
With that, students are given the opportunity to give course evaluations on the classes that they had.
According to the DSC InfoGuides, “each semester, students are invited to evaluate the course and instructor for each course in which they are enrolled. Students will receive an email with links to their evaluations. Results of evaluations are shared with Department Chairs and instructors after the submission of grades.”
The evaluations present twenty questions, ten on the class and ten on the instructor and their performance. Evaluations emails by the school are typically sent on or around Nov 14th for full-term fall classes, with availability ending on Dec 15th.
“I always do course evaluations. I personally use Rate My Professor to pick out professors for any class I do,” said Anastasia Romanov, a Nursing major at DSC. “I want to know beforehand that I’m in safe hands.”
Course evaluations submitted through DSC’s email and SmartEval are able to be accessed by professors and have more specific answers for you to select or allow for a higher word count. Rate My Professor is another evaluation site for classes and professors, but the small word count and specificity could limit a more genuine evaluation.
Rate My Professor is also not affiliated with DSC. Since it is not affiliated, DSC does not rely on the site for course and professor feedback.
While course evaluations are a good tool for students to say their piece on a class and instructor, and a great tool for instructors to receive their feedback, some students don’t do the evaluations.
Biomedical Science major, Payton Radcliffe said, “I think if there was more incentive to do them, probably more people would do them. Like Dr. (Roulana) Murad, she does extra credit points if you do, and you send a screenshot of it and, you know, put it in a discussion post.”
Most students expressed want for some type of reward from the evaluations, something that they thought could give other students more encouragement to complete the evaluations.
“What my teacher did was that in order for us to take our fourth (final) exam, she made us do the evaluations,” said Nursing major, Amanda Hernando. “I feel like if the school was more mandatory, like, ‘in order to take this exam you have to do this evaluation,’ then everybody would have like an idea of what to better in the course.”