By Vanessa Broadbent (The Cascade) – Email
At their December meeting, the UFV Senate revised the requirements for tenure and promotions for the Faculty of Professional Studies. Part of this revision included removing student evaluations as a factor for promotion, and replacing them with peer evaluations.
“They’re looking at how to make [student evaluations] useful, so they’re actually getting something they can use, because right now they can’t,” says Ryan Petersen, a student representative of the Senate. “You see people in class, some of them are writing books on them, and others are like, ‘Whatever,’ and they throw it in.”
Student evaluations are used at most universities as a way for faculties to assess their instructors’ teaching skills, as well as a way for students to anonymously share their feedback of the course and professor. Some universities, like SFU and UBC, manage the evaluation process online through their websites. UFV conducts its student evaluations through paper surveys, which are handed out to students and filled out while the teacher is not in the room.
“The form is a really easy anonymous way of being like, ‘I love this course,’ [or] ‘I had issues with this course,’ whatever the case may be,” Petersen says. “It [makes] it so much easier for new students or people who didn’t feel comfortable approaching the instructors or administration.”
Christine Slavik, one of two Faculty of Professional Studies representatives on Senate, says that UFV’s current student evaluation system is not useful to the faculty because it is structured as more of an evaluation of the course and its content, rather than an evaluation of the professor’s teaching skills.
“These things haven’t served much of a purpose,” she says. “They’re kind of automatically done, but they’re not informing people about their teaching skills, and we would like to have a system that does that.”
Despite the flaws in using student evaluations, faculty of science representative and associate physics professor Tim Cooper says that they are still the university’s best option at this point.
“In the past we’ve used student evaluations as the best guide for the reason students are there two or three times a week, every week. They see how it works, plus they know how this course fits in with [other] courses,” he says.
The new requirements for faculty promotion rely on a variety of indicators of teaching and writing work, but no student input. The proposed change brought to Senate states, “Criteria established by academic units for each rank must require evidence of peer review, of teaching and learning and scholarly activities, and confirmation of performance in service roles.”
“Instead of going for what the students think of the teaching, predominantly it will be what the peer thinks of the teaching,” Cooper says. “In a small department like mine, we have very few peers, we’re all friends. So what my buddy says about my teaching is considered more reliable, apparently, than what students would consider my teaching to be. I question that.”
The document also proposes the use of self evaluations, to be considered along with the peer evaluations.
“Peer evaluation and self evaluation have a possibility of some exaggeration, some inaccuracy, and I’d rather see the student evaluations,” Cooper says.
Slavik explains that when combined, the peer and self evaluations give the facility a stronger sense of each instructor’s teaching abilities.
“The dean will look at: does the way the person self evaluates match up to how [their] peers evaluate, and make a decision,” she says.
In discussion, the majority of Senate agreed that student evaluations, with their current set-up of questions and numerical rankings, are not nearly rigorous enough to be considered seriously in faculty decisions. Among other issues, the basic questions and format are in need of updating.
Cooper doesn’t disagree with this.
“Putting my scientist’s hat on, it is true. Whenever you have a measuring system, there is uncertainty in measurement,” he says. “But that’s true with all three methods … I have been a peer evaluator for other people. I go to their class, I sit through one lecture. They know I’m coming, so they can give the best lecture of their life and really prepare that one. But I’m not there for the other 14 weeks.”
Cooper sees student evaluations as the best option, and thinks that they should have a role in promotions.
“My personal ideal, would simply be to say that you can’t get promoted to associate professor unless you get a 4.2 on your average evaluations, and you can’t get to full professor without a 4.5,” he says. “We’re a teaching institution, that’s what you’ve got to do.”
Although professors will now be able to get promoted without the feedback provided through student evaluations, they will continue to be evaluated after their promotions. Slavik explained that there are universities that do not follow this structure, and therefore do not encourage their professors to continue to improve their teaching.
“That is definitely not the intent at UFV,” she says. “The intent is that there would still be some sort of evaluation that would continue to keep people relevant, fresh, and keep their professional development going.”
Student evaluations will not be eliminated completely, but they will no longer be a requirement for promotion.
“Student evaluations will, I hope, still be there, but it’s not clear what role they’ll be playing,” Cooper says.
Petersen also shares this sentiment, and would like to see the evaluations still be used.
“I was a little bit sad that they weren’t going to have them be part of that process,” he says. “Even as broken as it was, I was hoping that they would keep it on and acknowledge that it’s not perfect and then fix it.”
Slavik notes that student evaluations will go under further review by Senate and hopefully be used again as part of the process in the future.
“My understanding around that is that people would like to see that particular evaluation piece be constructed more meaningfully, that we come up with a better system of having the students evaluate professors,” she says.
