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Evaluation

It is important to us that the lectures and seminars at the institute are of high quality. That is why we think teaching evaluations are a great idea. To ensure that they are truly useful, we have a few recommendations.

If there is any news about evaluations at our institute, you will find it on our blog.

Always use the free text fields

A rating from 0 to 100, as given to lecturers at the end of an evaluation (aggregated from the answers to the pre-defined questions), is just as useless as constructive feedback as a rating from 1.0 to 5.0. We therefore recommend that you always use the free text fields.

  • If you do not want to provide any feedback because you simply found the course to be satisfactory, it is best to state this (“The course was satisfactory, keep up the good work.”). Then the lecturers will know that they can do everything the same way next time and will not have to interpret the silence.
  • If you have criticism, try to make it as actionable as possible, e.g. “Please provide more exercise sheets” or “Please provide fewer exercise sheets” or “Please allow us to submit a term paper instead of a project” or “Please do not allow us to submit a term paper instead of a project” – whatever you feel like saying.
  • Lecturers are always happy to receive praise for a good course, so don’t hold back. 🙂

Anonymity

It would actually be best to give positive and negative feedback directly, face to face. However, since there is a power imbalance between students and lecturers (bad grades can ruin an academic career, but poor evaluation results rarely affect a professor’s career), this is not always the ideal approach.

We therefore recommend anonymous feedback. This is easy to implement technically (see recommendations for lecturers). If you give feedback, make sure that your recommendations for action are as detailed as possible so that the feedback can be understood without further questions.

Debrief

As the student council, we ask all lecturers to discuss the feedback with you. In the debriefing, you will find out what feedback your fellow students have given and how the lecturer plans to deal with it.

We ask lecturers to maintain anonymity and avoid questions such as “Who gave this answer?”. If further questions or discussion are necessary, we are happy to act as mediators between lecturers and students.

Please understand that not all recommendations for action can be implemented: we live in a society, and sometimes one person’s stumbling block is another’s silver lining – in this case, the best outcome is likely to be a compromise. However, if the students’ opinion seems clear and the lecturers still do not respond to it, please contact us.

Recommendations for lecturers

An effective online evaluation can be very short, for example with two free text fields and the questions:

  1. “What did you find good and should be retained?”
  2. “What did you find bad and should be changed (how)?”

We recommend CryptPad Forms or the feedback activity in Moodle as survey tools.

This page (or parts of it) were translated automatically using DeepL.