The Purpose of Course Evaluations

Course evaluations at Marylhurst University serve three primary purposes:

• To provide instructors with a point of information about student experience that can help them identify strengths and make decisions, in conjunction with other information, about ways to improve their courses and/or teaching.
• To provide deans and department chairs with a point of information that will help them make decisions, in conjunction with other information, about courses and instruction.
• To provide a source of data about student experience to inform institutional assessment of instructional excellence and student satisfaction with academic quality.

Our Online System

Marylhurst has been conducting course evaluations online since Winter 2009. The move to an online system was mainly motivated by:

• The desire for a single system that would be available to all our students, both on-campus and online;
• The need for a system that would allow us to quickly and easily aggregate the results of a course, across courses, across programs, and across terms or years;
• The hope that allowing students to complete course evaluations on their own time might result in more consistently thoughtful responses;
• The promise of conserving over 130,000 sheets of paper every year and many hours each term previously spent photocopying course evaluations for distribution to faculty and department chairs when we used a paper system.

We currently use EvaluationKIT as our course evaluation system.

Faculty FAQ (requires login)
Student FAQ (no login required)

Results

2011 Course Evaluation Report
2012 Course Evaluation Report