Student Course Ratings Go Online -- UW Posts Data At New Web Site

At the urging of its students, the University of Washington has created a site on the Internet where anyone can find student opinions on thousands of courses - and how well the professors teach them.

That means anyone in the world can see, for example, that Professor Ernst Behler received extremely high ratings in his comparative-literature course - and that a number of other professors don't fare so well, some scoring as low as 2 on a 5-point scale.

With a little digging, it's obvious that in several of the UW's large introductory-math lectures, the textbook is considered only slightly better than fair, while the course content in large psychology lectures receives good or very-good ratings.

So far more than 3,000 courses from fall quarter are evaluated in the online catalog, which eventually will contain ratings for about 8,000 courses a year.

Such data have been available for decades but have not been easily accessible. Now the data will be almost instantly available to anyone with access to the Internet.

The site has been in the works for three years. The Associated Students of the University of Washington pushed for the site and paid to have it developed.

The evaluations are intended to give faculty members feedback to help improve their teaching, to be used in decisions about faculty promotions and tenure, and to help students make decisions about which courses to take.

Students think the service will be especially valuable if faculty members pass a proposal on dropping classes.

Now, students can stay as long as seven weeks before dropping a 10-week class. The proposal would limit most drops to about two weeks so other students could take high-demand courses.

Ratings on a variety of questions range from a high of 5, for excellent, to zero, for very poor. Questions are about the course content, the instructor's contribution and effectiveness, the amount learned and grading techniques.

Most courses receive median ratings in the "good" to "very good" range.

Sporadically over the years, the ratings have been published in a catalog, but it was expensive to produce and not widely distributed. Students also could go to the Office of Educational Assessment and pay $1 per evaluation. The Web provides a far more economical, speedy way to release the information.

The UW also hopes to make course syllabuses and professors' teaching philosophies available on the Web.

The evaluation form also includes open-ended written comments, but the university does not consider those comments public information and releases them only to teachers.

Though the faculty council on instructional quality has blessed the publishing of the evaluations on the Internet, it's still expected to be controversial. Some faculty members think the information should be private; others think student ratings are largely a popularity contest.

Miceal Vaughan, associate professor of English and comparative literature, said he has no objections to publishing evaluations of his courses on the Internet. "I'm an employee of the public," he said.

At the same time, he said he would prefer not to have his entire reputation as a teacher based on those student evaluations, which aren't necessarily always reliable.

"I'm sure some faculty will think this is another push toward grade inflation," said Gerald Gillmore, director of the Office of Educational Assessment.

Links to the University of Washington Course Evaluation Catalog on the World Wide Web are on The Seattle Times Today's News Web site at: http://www.seattletimes.com