Interpret Your Reports
When you access your semester reports, the student ratings system provides five tabs containing report information.
The Overview tab is a summary of the entire rating report presented in a concise and easy to understand manner.
The other four sections are Instructor Effectiveness, BYU Aims, Workload, and Grading. These sections combine information about questions that correspond to the individual sections. For example, the BYU Aims section contains an in-depth look at the four questions about helping students achieve the aims of a BYU education.
Interpret Reports - FAQ
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Toggle ItemHow do I use data from the old ratings and the new ratings in arriving at rank and status decisions?
You cannot derive a composite number that makes a decision for you. However, you can identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses, and contextualize that information with other sources of information (peer review, comments made to the chair, etc.). No rating system will allow us to calculate instructor effectiveness. However, student ratings can be an important part of a carefully conceived interpretative process.
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Toggle ItemWhere should a chair look first in reading the report of the new instrument?
There is no assumption that any one datum is more important than any other. If a faculty member has difficulty with organization, then the second question under Instructor Effectiveness may be the most important number to consider, etc.
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Toggle ItemHow do we ensure that department, college and university reviewers read the new ratings consistently?
This is a good question, though not a new one: it applies equally to the old tool. Deans will continue to discuss inconsistencies in interpretation of student ratings to assure some uniformity in approach across the college, and the AAVP-Faculty will do the same with the University Council on Faculty Rank and Status.
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Toggle ItemIs the new instrument formative or summative?
It was designed to improve the quality of information available to those charged with summative evaluation. However, the ratings continue to be a rich source of information for faculty looking to understand better what is working and what is not—especially when combined with the Mid-Course Evaluation.
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Toggle ItemHow do we deal with courses with small enrollments?
We recognize that the results will be less reliable (but not unreliable) when compared with courses with large enrollments, and we draw conclusions cautiously. Other methods of instructor evaluation (e.g. peer review) are especially important when faculty teach small courses.
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Toggle ItemWhat does the Workload number tell us?
Student perception of total hours per week outside of class spent on the class per credit hour.
