Next week, willing volunteers (namely your Course Critiques director and whomever else she is able to recruit) will meet to prepare the course evaluation packages – around 300 of them, containing an average of 72 questionnaires each. The packages will be sent to professors and instructors, who will bring them to class from March 11 to 22, 2013. Student representatives will be called upon to distribute the questionnaires to every student in the class, collect them when they are completed, and deliver them to the EngSoc office. Later, more student volunteers will meet to prepare the packages for computerized scanning; removing the extra golf pencils and blank questionnaires, making sure all the sheets face the same direction, and getting all the packages over to the scanner in MC.
It’s a process that has been repeated every semester for over 40 years. And yes, it’s quite a big undertaking, but it’s one we believe is well worth it.
After the packages have been scanned (but only after course grades have been posted in Quest), the data will be used to prepare reports for department chairs, and the original completed questionnaires will be distributed to the corresponding instructors so that they can review the comments you write on the back. The electronic data will be uploaded into a database that the Associate Dean, Teaching uses to inform course improvement efforts. The data will also be uploaded to the online Course Critiques site (https://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/critiques/) so that you and future students may review the results.
Your thoughtful and candid responses to course evaluation survey questions have a big impact. Your instructors rely on your feedback to improve their teaching. Your faculty and department use your feedback to make tenure and promotion decisions. And the Associate Dean, Teaching will use your feedback to help gauge how effectively our teaching supports our students.
Thank you for your time, your feedback, and, most importantly, for your continued support of this longstanding and valued process.
Sincerely,
Gordon Stubley
Associate Dean, Teaching
Shari King
Course Critiques Director
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