Making Sense of Student End-of-Course Written Evaluations
By Todd Zakrajsek

End-of-the-course student ratings are often a frustrating experience for many faculty. On the one hand, we want to know what our students think about the course and to make adjustments to aid in their learning. On the other hand, these comments are at times not helpful, or may be wildly different from one another. Often, within the same course students comments are as varied as ‘the course was really good’ to ‘awful class and the person teaching it needs a new job.” It can be very difficult to make sense of such comments, but there are methods that can be used to make excellent use of your students’ comments.

The most important consideration is realizing that, much like every aspect of life, there is variability in everything. Some comments will be very helpful, and others, well, not so much. Some students are really interested in providing information that you can use to improve on your teaching, and other students try their best to shock you. The trick is to sort though the comments quickly and find a way to make sense of the meaningful comments and at the same time to ignore or greatly ‘discount’ those other comments. Most importantly, keep in mind that regardless of what you think about these ratings, students see you teach more than anyone else, and it is their learning we are trying to improve. Therefore, their comments can be very helpful.

To start this process, first sort comments into categories. Read the first written response by the first student. Select a word or two to summarize this response to place it into a category. For example, suppose the first question on the End-of-Course Form is, “What did the instructor do to facilitate learning in this course?” Your first student response is, “I really like the quizzes, they helped motivate me to study.” Based on this response, your first category will be ‘quizzes.’ Now move to the next student and read her first written response. Note here you are moving to the first response by the second student, NOT reading through all responses by that first student. The idea is to sort responses within questions. If your next student writes, “Posting notes on the Blackboard shell was really helpful,” this comment gets put into a new category of Bb notes. Suppose yet another student writes, “This class rocks, I loved everything about the course.” This is a great comment and should be put aside for perking you up on bad days, but for now this goes into a category of “no specific comments for improvement.” Again, it is nice to know your student likes your course, but the focus here is on what specifically can be done to improve the course.

If a student happens to write more than one useful comment within the question you are reading, jot down the additional items on scrap pieces of paper. That will allow you to place comments into appropriate piles. That is, if a student writes, “The exams really made me study and the study groups were also really helpful,” then place the form itself in the ‘exam’ pile and a scrap paper with ‘study groups’ into the ‘study groups’ pile.

Once you have made it through all of your student responses for this response item it is time to deal with the piles. Set the ‘no help’ pile aside. You can read through that pile again later for entertainment, but for addressing course issues this pile is not helpful. Next select the largest pile and read through all comments in that pile. As you read through the pile jot down a few notes of specific things you can change about your course next semester to address these issues. Continue to do this until all piles are addressed.

For your final step, place a number at the top of your notes reflecting how many items were in that pile over the number of students in the course (not the number of evaluations received). This indicates the weight placed on that issue and gives you perspective. For example, if you had 40 students in the course and ‘exams’ was your largest pile with 18 responses, then you know this is a big issue for your students and you place 18/40 at the top of the paper with your notes on ‘things to consider for next semester.’ If your next largest pile was ‘course notes on your Blackboard shell’ with 8 items you know this issue was noted by less than half as many students as commented on quizzes, and that only 8/40 students commented on this concept. As you can see, if you have some notes with the number 1/40 at the top, addressing this issue may well assist the class, but only one person in the entire class commented on that concept.

When this is complete, you move to the next written response item and repeat the procedure. As you can see, when you have completed this task you have considered many aspects of the course and recorded some possible changes, but you also now have perspective on which things are most important to most students.

For the following semester, I typically suggest faculty identify 2 – 3 “things” to change. This technique allows you to identify those items that will have the greatest impact on the course. As you can see, this approach also identifies ways to “discount” those off-the-wall comments. Now, comments such as “Your clothes are out of date, you need a new wardrobe,” are quickly sorted into the ‘not helpful’ pile and set aside. No more dwelling on those comments and instead you spend time on the issues that impact most of the students.

Resource for this Article

Zakrajsek, T. (2006). Using evaluation data to improve teaching effectiveness. In Peter Seldin (Ed.), Evaluating faculty performance: A practical guide to assessing teaching, research, and service. Bolton MA: Anker Publishing.