End of Course Evaluations
Beginning with Spring 2021 B-Term end of course evaluations, instructors are able to self-retrieve their own evaluations directly from the course feedback platform, Watermark, which can be accessed via Canvas. After course grades are submitted and approved by the registrar, you will receive an email once your evaluations are ready to be reviewed. This screencast, as well as that notification email, shows how to retrieve your student feedback reports from within Canvas. The format of the new reports looks different than it was in the past, but all the same data is preserved.
Most importantly, the Course BIE and Instructor BIE values represented prominently in the new report format are the values which are historically shared as the Course and Instructor ratings. (Here "BIE" stands for the Bounded Influence Estimator, which is the algorithm through which all of course data is processed, designed to reduce the influence of outlier responses. This is different from the "mean" value which is sprinkled through the report elsewhere.)
Note that there are a number of report styles which you can extract from the feedback platform, including a "Raw Data" report which allows you to view all feedback within an Excel output, in which each line represents the full response of a student, so you can see clearly how student quantitative and qualitative responses are related, or you may sort by a particular question.
Also, in Summer 2021 the Dean’s office launched an initiative with the goal of driving the response rate of student feedback. If a student fails to complete a feedback form for a course, their final grade will be held until the end of the term. Grades will only be suppressed in a course for which a student does not provide feedback. A grade will be held until the term’s grading period concludes, typically three weeks after the final class session for a given term (A/B/Full). To help encourage student feedback, and to limit as much as possible the number of students for whom the delivery of grades will be delayed, please ensure you are giving students 15 minutes during the last class session to complete this feedback. We recommend allowing students to complete this feedback preceding the class wrap-up and final takeaways.