Legal Commentary

In a previous post, I cited to anecdotal data showing that the percentage of students completing student evaluations has sharply decreased as schools have switched from paper and pencil evaluations to their online counterparts.  The post also noted that one of the main reasons why schools have switched to online evaluations is because they are so much more efficient than older evaluation systems in which administrators had to compile results by hand or at least combine results after running evaluations through Scantron machines. But have we taken advantage of this increased efficiency by unduly increasing the number of questions asked on student evaluations, and has this contributed to the decrease in the percentage of students completing student evaluations?

At my school, student evaluation forms currently have 24 questions. This is markedly more than the number of questions on forms I used to fill out. To the best of my memory, most forms had between 5-10 questions when I was a student. I am on the Student Affairs Committee at my school, and we just put forward to our faculty a modified student evaluation form that only asks 5 questions. The theory is that with a reduced number of questions, we will increase the percentage of students completing evaluations. But will it work, or will students who don't feel like answering 24 questions feel the same about answering 5 questions (or do they not fill out forms based upon other concerns such as concerns about anonymity)?

Of course, this begs the question of which is better: 50% of students filling out a 24 question form or 80% of students filling out a 5 question form. Certainly, if we're using evaluations for tenure and promotion decisions, we would prefer the latter so that we can have statistical significance. But, if professors care more about student feedback on a variety of teaching criteria (24 at my school) than about the fact that 48 rather than 30 students are giving that feedback (on only 5 criteria), we would prefer the former. So, what do you think? How many questions are on your student evaluation forms? Has that number increased in recent years? Would a decrease in the number of questions significantly increase the percentage of students completing student evaluations? And would such a change be desirable? You can answer by responding to the following poll and/or leaving a comment.  

-Colin Miller