Ratings and Teaching Dimensions

Course evaluation ratings within overall Faculty Evaluation Rating

There will be several changes to the way ratings will work with student course evaluations moving forwards. Some of these are a result of the new ratings that will be used with faculty evaluations and the requirements for how student course evaluations will fit in the new faculty evaluation system:

• Student course evaluations will be included in the Student Feedback and Faculty Reflection portion of the overall faculty evaluation. The rating for this component will be based on the student course evaluation rating (see below), the student comments, and the faculty reflection on their course evaluations (in the Faculty Reflection Form, question 3) all together.

• Student Feedback and Faculty Reflection will be weighted as 20%-30% of the overall faculty evaluation rating, according to departmental requirements.

Revised ratings for student course evaluations

5-point Likert Scale

The new course evaluation surveys use a revised 5 point Likert scale (recommended by OIRA) of: 

• 1 - Strongly disagree 

• 2 - Disagree

• 3 - Neither agree nor disagree

• 4 - Agree 

• 5 - Strongly agree 

• - N/A -

Teaching dimensions

In order to provide faculty with clearer information on how their students felt about different aspect of their teaching, faculty will be provided with individual ratings in each of the following "teaching dimensions", based on student responses to particular sets of questions:

• Course Design and Organization

• Instructional Methods

• Assessment and Feedback

• Class Culture

• Student Learning

There are also multiple opportunities for students to provide more free-response comments and some unrated questions at the end to help faculty understand which different types of activities students believe are most helpful to them.

New course evaluation ratings

The new course evaluation rating scale has been brought into alginment with the new faculty evaluation ratings; ratings for the revised student course evaluations will be determined as follows, based upon this 5 point Likert scale:

For each section taught, the mean of all Likert scale questions will be determined and rounded to the nearest 0.1. The rating will be based on this mean:

• If the mean is from 4.0 to 5.0, the rating will be ACC exemplary teaching and faculty expectations have been met

• If the mean is from 3.0 to 3.9, the rating will be Approaching ACC exemplary teaching and faculty expectations

• If the mean is less than 3.0, the rating will be Does not meet ACC faculty expectations

If the software is unable to average all questions, the average of the means of the five teaching dimensions is an acceptable stand-in. 

After 2 years, data from the revised course evaluations will be examined by the Faculty Evaluation Steering Committee to determine if these ratings continue to meet the needs of the college.

Low response rates

The Student Feedback and Faculty Reflection section of the new Annual Summary Evaluation Forms has a checkbox for  “Low Response – Interpret Ratings with Caution” for situations where there were too few student responses to consider the overall rating as fair to the faculty member:

For any class sections where the total number of student responses is less than 20% of the class enrollment or 3 responses, whichever is higher, only student comments and answers to individual questions will be considered in the Student Feedback and Faculty Reflection rating; the overall rating for that class section will not be considered.