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Details on course evaluations from the Associate Dean, Academic’s Office :

At the end of each course, you are expected to ask someone in your department (check with your department head for local details) to administer the process of obtaining course evaluations from the students - course evaluations are very important to current students, to future students and the instructors. For current students, they give a chance to provide honest and anonymous feedback on course and instruction quality. For future students and the instructors, the feedback contributes to continuous improvement of the quality of our courses.

Course evaluations are submitted to the Office of the Associate Dean, Academic or the Registry, where they are forwarded to independent consultants. The written comments are typed and the scores on the evaluations are summarized for each question.  The original evaluations are destroyed. The score summary and typed written comments are returned to the instructor well after the end of the semester.  If there are fewer than five responses for a particular class, nothing is sent to the instructor until future years, when at least five responses have been obtained and anonymity can be ensured.

Instructors are expected to use the course evaluations to help improve their courses - it is important to encourage students to consider the intent of each question carefully and provide thoughtful feedback. Most instructors encourage and receive feedback throughout the semester from their students, which also is important and may give a chance for the instructor to improve the course midstream.  However, the end-of-semester formal course evaluation is the best opportunity for anonymous feedback if the student feels reluctant to be critical of a particular class exercise or style of teaching. Students should also be reminded that instructors like to hear what is working well in the classroom too!

Thank you in advance for engaging in this process.

Leslie MacLaren, Ph.D., P. Ag
Associate Dean, Academic

Please note - Evaluations should be completed in the second last week of classes. (November 19-23, 2012) . Although some of you may have received an email concerning on-line course evaluations, the Agricultural Campus has been excluded from the on-line process and will continue with our regular system of course evaluations for the fall 2012 course evaluations.

Please arrange to have the department secretary or another faculty/staff member not associated with the course distribute the evaluations and read the instructions to the students.  They will then need to designate a student to collect all evaluation forms, including those not completed and return them to the Registry or to the Office of the Associate Dean, Academic in Cumming Hall.   The instructor should not be in the classroom at this time.