Online evaluations problematic

By D. Lynn Bond
The Collegian

IMAGINE WALKING UP to your polling station in the next election and being asked to swipe your driver’s license before being able to vote. The outrage of the American public would be immense and ever-present in the media, yet something very similar is happening at Fresno State and you might not even know it.

In the past week many Fresno State students have received e-mails with instructions for completing online teacher evaluations. When students follow the link provided they are asked to enter their Fresno State e-mail and password before being able to complete teacher evaluations.

While the e-mail and the site students are directed to states this information will not be collected with the survey results or distributed to teachers, it is still unsettling to have to enter it. The justification of putting one’s name on the Web site is to make sure students do not write numerous evaluations and to keep students not enrolled in the class from completing evaluations.

This brings up several points as to why this policy makes little sense. First, what college student has the time to sneakily write multiple evaluations for the same class? Typically students are excited when in class evaluations came up not because they had the ability to write scathing reviews of their professors, but because they could sail through the evaluation and leave class a few minutes early.

Because, as we all know, getting out of class early is like opening an unexpected Christmas present.

The second issue presented is the fact that students IDs are on their evaluation. The possibilities of what the school administration can do with this information are scary. If a student wrote a particularly unique review of a professor, their anonymity is essentially gone.

In addition under the old in-class evaluation system a student who is not enrolled in the class but who happens to be there on the evaluation day, as a guest or for any other reason, could also fill out an evaluation since the proctor rarely knows the class well enough to tell if there are out of place students.

This makes the second justification for entering student information pointless, clearly if a student wants to fill out a false evaluation they will find a way.

After students enter his or her e-mail and password the site takes them to a page with their name and student ID number in the corner and a list of the classes the student are in that are asking for evaluations.

The evaluations themselves are separate links, but if you start a survey you have to finish it then, and once it is submitted it cannot be changed. The student’s name and student ID number remains on the screen at all times during the process.

The presence of the name and student ID number throughout the process is unsettling to say the least. In the mere two paragraphs of instructions and information available to students before taking the surveys it does not explain how their information will be removed from the survey so students have to trust a system they do not know or understand.

This is a far cry from the way evaluations were handled in past semesters, when they were handed out in class. An outside person would come and distribute the evaluations, forms and papers and students are asked to fill them out in class, during class time.

While the process may feel like a waste of class time and does have its flaws, it is fairly effective. Students are a captive audience in their classes and while evaluations are never required, you are much more likely to fill one out if the alternative is to just sit in class doing nothing.

With online evaluations the only people who are going to take the time to go out of their way to fill out an evaluation are going to be those who have strong feelings about their professors, negative or positive, giving a skewed sample. If a student has mild or average feelings about a professor, they likely will not take the time to fill out an evaluation. “Good students” will, because he or she will feel compelled to complete their homework as usual. But this again gives a skewed example, as ‘bad students’ will slack off as usual and ignore the evaluation.

Perhaps it is a fear of something new that drives this suspicion of online evaluations yet it feels much more comfortable to hand a paper evaluation with no name on it to a real person than to fill out a survey on the computer with your name and student ID number on the screen at all times.

There is clearly no perfect way to take student evaluations, yet students should feel comfortable about making evaluations for there to be any value to what they say. For now the confidence in an online system is just not there to justify its use.

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