Course Experience Surveys

Inspired by Dr Bruce Ravelli from Sociology, I have decided to post all of my course experience surveys (CES) on my website. As with any sort of survey, they include a mix of positive and negative comments with a lot of in-between. I try to use the survey information, especially the comment sections, to help inform how I teach my courses. I use student feedback received via the CES in conjunction with email and other student communications, feedback from teaching assistants, and peer observations of teaching by colleagues when I work on updating and redesigning all of my courses.

UVic sends the CES links to students at the end of each semester. Instructors do not see the results until after grades for those courses have been submitted and all responses remain anonymous. Research suggests that student surveys are often biased, especially when assessing faculty belonging to marginalised groups such woman, non-binary people, BIPOC people, and others (Kreitzer et al. 2022).

Despite the known biases, I really do want feedback from my students. The best ways to provide that via the CES is to write detailed comments with concrete observations or recommendations. For example, “I didn’t really understand why the quizzes happened before the lectures” tells me that I need to communicate the purpose of the quizzes better! “No more quizzes” doesn’t really give me anything I can work with. Those detailed comments are what I search the CES for when I am revising my courses!

The files are labelled by year, semester, course number, and section. So, 202301 ANTH100 A01 means 2023, January, ANTH 100, etc. The semester codes are UVic codes, where -01 = courses that start in January, -05 = summer semester courses, and -09 = courses that start in September.

Kreitzer, R.J., Sweet-Cushman, J. Evaluating Student Evaluations of Teaching: a Review of Measurement and Equity Bias in SETs and Recommendations for Ethical Reform. J Acad Ethics 20, 73–84 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-021-09400-w