Faculty and Unclassified Staff Handbook
Chapter 7 -- Student Affairs
Evaluations of Faculty
Administration of Student Evaluations of Faculty Policy
Student evaluations of faculty are an important element in the evaluation of faculty for course quality, tenure, promotion and merit. Consequently, it is important that the evaluations be administered with reasonable uniformity throughout the University and that the procedures followed optimize the validity of the data collected, especially data regarding the instructional skills of the professor and the academic quality of the course. In that respect, the following guidelines are proposed for the administration of student evaluations of faculty.
1. Course evaluations are administered by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Quality Improvement (IEQI) using BLUE, an automated web based managed system. Course information is extracted from the course scheduling system and imported in to the course evaluation system. By default, all courses are opted in to the course evaluation system, but department chairs have a window of time during which they can opt out any course under their prevue from being evaluated.
2. The evaluation period for a course is during the two-week period leading up to, but not including finals week (certain exceptions apply on short courses). This period is logically set using the beginning and ending course dates in the course scheduling system.
Every course evaluated uses the same base survey that was approved by Faculty Senate with 3 additional questions added to all FHSU online courses. Additional (optional) questions can be added by the instructor or department chair but those results are not part of the report titled “Individual Course Instructor Short Report (one instructor)” which was developed for tenure and promotion purposes.
3. The faculty member (instructor) does not have access to the student evaluations until two weeks after the end date of the course. The student evaluations shall be employed for tenure, promotion, and merit considerations and at the departmental level to enhance the professional development of the instructor. Faculty members shall have the opportunity to respond to any student evaluations either in writing or verbally to the department chair, and at the request of the instructor, any written response shall become a part of the student evaluation file for that particular class and shall accompany the student evaluations in the instructor's tenure, promotion, or merit files.
4. Course evaluation reports are available through the course evaluation system (BLUE). Reports can be downloaded in PDF form and archived locally.