Poole College of Management’s business class is helping out University Planning and Analysis to increase the response rate up for the class evaluation.
Students of BUS 360 class, taught by Professor Ed Weems, were split into six groups and asked to get suggestions for the class evaluation. The project that finished first was the team of Thomas Payne, Alexa Hollis, Danika Wilsher and Alex Corbett.
Thomas Payne, junior in human resources, said Trey Standish, assistant director for enrollment planning, briefed them about the class evaluation system and asked them to research ways to make it better.
“[Standish] said that 20 to 30 percent of class evaluations were filled out in the past couple of years, which is really bad and before they switched to online system he said that participation was 95 percent because you would come to the class during finals, fill out a paper evaluation and hand that in with the test, so everybody did it,” Payne said.
Payne also said some teams tried raising participation by giving students incentives like loyalty points, but this system doesn’t work as expected.
“Some groups tried a loyalty point incentive, like if you filled out the class evaluation you would get loyalty points for game tickets. They would certainly increase the participation but wouldn’t improve the validity of the response which would hurt the value of the response you got,” Payne said.
Payne said his group focused on improving the quality of the response.
According to Payne, his team’s main strategy was to keep things simple.
“We wanted to create simple ways to implement new strategies in the current system and not overhaul it totally. We wanted to be understandable for the new freshmen coming in, just get in more avenues for kids to get in their evaluation and get a motivation which is intrinsic and not extrinsic for students to complete class evaluation,” Payne said.
Payne claimed there are no direct benefits to students. Though the University asks students to do it for the good of the school, he doesn’t think students connect with the idea.
“The format that they have right now we don’t think is easy to understand. We don’t think it is very informative and good, and then there is hardly any advertisement about why one should fill out class evaluation and how it would benefit the University [and] what it does for students,” Payne said.
Payne elaborated on the surveys and suggestions his team presented to UPA as a midterm evaluation.
“We did a little survey on what students think about midterm evaluation and the students can fill them out and teachers can effectively use them to alter the class they are teaching, and the students felt like their comments and suggestions were heard. Teachers cared and classes improved and in the end grades improved, and all of it is backed by research,” Payne said.
One of the more surprising aspects of the project, according to Payne, were some of the statistics his team discovered.
“One thing that baffled me in my survey results was that only 25 percent of students said that they don’t fill out Class Evals honestly. I would have to think about why the statistic is what it is,” Payne said.
Another goal of this project was to show what students thought about specific professors, Payne said.
“They should incorporate student opinions about the teacher as in they were good or bad as long as they were respectful and have a censorship over such comments because selecting a class is like buying a product and to be able to review it is a necessity,” Payne said.
Weems said UPA would be making considerable changes to class evaluation in the future.
“As I understand, UPA is going to make some very significant changes to the class evaluation,” Weems said.
According to Weems, the program lacks marketing, making a marketing class best suited for the research.
“They need to market the program to the students and that’s why they needed a marketing class for the research. They were looking for ways to make students receptive of what they have to offer,” Weems said.
Standish said the response rate to the class evaluation was dwindling to the point that it prompted UPA to look to a marketing class to help them improve that aspect of Class Evals.
“What got UPA to get this research out was that the response rate to the Class Eval was decreasing. We needed a marketing plan to get students to fill out the evaluation and so we got marketing class to help us out,” Standish said.
The new changes to Class Evals will be implemented fairly soon, according to Standish.
“A few recommendations are already underway, and we are working on getting approvals on the rest and it should be implemented in a year or two.” Standish said.
