T. E. Roberts, Instructor / Course Evaluations By USF Students

T. E. Roberts, Instructor | USF Sarasota-Manatee

Course Evaluations By Students | Fall 2003 to Present

Page updated 20 November 2008

Clicking on the link at the bottom of this page will result in downloading a compressed (zipped) document containing evaluations of courses by my students from Fall 2003 to Summer 2008 in Adobe PDF format. The combined evaluations since Fall 2003 represent a large file (more than 22 MB); links are also provided for evaluations from individual semesters. These are exact scans of the original USF evaluation results; no changes of any kind occur in these documents.

Each evaluation consists of two parts:

(1) statistical results of a questionnaire about the course (“best” = 5.0), and

(2) brief anonymous comments by individual students.

Beginning with the Summer 2008 evaluations, I provide a brief response to selected student comments in order to address a student’s confusion or to correct an obvious misunderstanding.

One theme remains constant through the student comments over the years: the students who feel they benefited from a course tended to:

1) pay attention to instructions

2) try to improve their work

3) communicate regularly with the instructor, and

4) treat the learning experience, the instructor, and their classmates with respect and professionalism.

A NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS

Anonymity obviously is a two-edged sword. It provides confidentiality but may also violate an individual’s right to due process.

Students are asked to be fair, honest, and unbiased in their appraisals of the course and the instructor. However, based on surveys conducted by me and other faculty members over the years, it is obvious that most students who write negative appraisals have never sought individual conferences with the instructor.

In my judgment, the university has instituted a well-considered process for the filing of formal student grievances (http://www.ugs.usf.edu/catalogs/0607/arcsagp.htm). The first step is for a student to confer directly and personally with his or her instructor. This usually results in the settling of any misunderstanding, and this procedure should also apply in any disagreement between a student and an instructor.

In the absence of such a conference (especially in online courses where most communications occur via email), it is easy for a student to feel slighted because he or she is simply unhappy with a grade. This happens occasionally with people who think of themselves as “A students” but who earn a B+ or other, in their view, unsatisfactory grade. If such a student has never bothered to discuss the evaluation of an assignment at the time it is submitted and graded, the resentment at the end of a term over an “unfair” final grade may lead to an unfounded negative appraisal of an instructor or a course.

In fairness, the student should first accept individual responsibility for the outcome of his or her performance in a course. This is one reason that I emphasize throughout the course that a student EARNS a grade based on performance. The instructor DOES NOT “GIVE” a grade.

The dates below correspond to the semester in which the courses were presented. These include the following: