student filling out a test booklet

End-of-Term Course Evaluations

Yale facilitates anonymous teaching evaluations through the Online Course Evaluations (OCE) system.

At a Glance

  • The Yale Registrar’s office manages anonymous teaching evaluations through the Online Course Evaluations (OCE) system, which students typically complete when they receive course grades.
  • Yale includes twelve standardized questions for each student to answer for every course enrolled, but instructors can also add customized questions if desired.
  • Instructors should be aware of potential bias when reviewing course evaluations as studies have revealed that women and instructors of color systematically receive lower evaluations, in addition to instructors who assign higher workloads (Chávez and Mitchell, 2020). 

What Are End-of-Term Course Evaluations?

Recommendations

References & Resources

What are End-of-Term Course Evaluations?

In Yale College and GSAS courses with an enrollment of five or more, students participate in online end-of-term course evaluations. These anonymous teaching evaluations are managed through the Online Course Evaluations (OCE) system. Every course evaluation includes standardized questions, but instructors can add their own custom questions. Instructors should be aware that some information collected through OCE is ultimately made available to Yale students through the student viewer, which they are known to use when selecting courses. Faculty can also access their own Dashboard in OCE that allows for convenient analysis of course evaluation results.

Students usually complete the OCE survey when they receive notification that their grade for a course has been posted. While Yale does not mandate student participation, Yale prevents students from being able to view their online grade for a class until they submit the completed OCE. Students are expected to answer all questions on the end-of-term course evaluation, or at least choose to decline questions. Students who withdraw from the course after the midterm also have the option of evaluating the course, even though they are not receiving a grade. 

Recommendations

Yale includes twelve standardized questions for each student to answer for every course enrolled. If an instructor seeks a particular kind of feedback from students, such as feedback on a new teaching technique, they can submit a custom question for inclusion on their course’s end-of-term OCE. 

While students may rely heavily on course evaluations when making course enrollment decisions, many experts and educators caution against instructors putting too much stake in OCE results. Debate continues over the proper uses and general validity of student evaluations. The literature suggests that female instructors and instructors of color are consistently rated lower than their colleagues (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; (Chávez and Mitchell, 2020), while male professors tend to be evaluated more positively than female professors (Martin, 2016). Some studies also suggest that teachers who receive higher marks from students tend to observe less real student learning than those who may give harsher grades and assign more work to students (Uttl, White, and Gonzalez, 2017). Thus, instructors may want to consider student evaluations as just one data source in their instruction and avoid over-emphasizing outlier data or biased commentary. 

Instructors can always schedule a consultation with the Poorvu Center to discuss OCE results. The usage of OCE data does vary immensely across fields and departments: for instance, some departments may use evaluations in considering tenure and promotion, while others never look at the data. Yale students tend to use course evaluation info for a specific purpose: to determine which classes to take.

The Poorvu Center also offers programming such as the annual Course (Re)Design Institute to support instructors in assessing student evaluation data collected.  

References

Chávez, K, and Mitchell, KMW. (2020). Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. PS: Political Science & Politics. 53(2): 270-274. doi:10.1017/S1049096519001744

y Muhs, G. G., Niemann, Y. F., González, C. G., & Harris, A. P. (Eds.). (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. University Press of Colorado.

Martin, L. (2016). Gender, Teaching Evaluations and Professional Success in Political Science. American Political Science Association p. 313-319.

Uttl, B., White, C. A., & Gonzalez, D. W. (2017). Meta-analysis of faculty’s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54, 22-42.

  1. UC Berkeley’s Center for Teaching & Learning has a useful Course Evaluations Question Bank.
  2. The Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning has a webpage on end-of-term evaluations.
  3. Stanford’s Teaching Commons provides a resource on course evaluations.