End-term Course Feedback prior to Fall 2015

Stanford substantially changed the end-term course feedback forms in Autumn Quarter of the 2015–2016 academic year. This was the result of the recommendations of the faculty Course Evaluation Committee to provide better information to faculty, encourage students to reflect more thoughtfully about their educational experiences, and enhance the learning partnership.

Due to the significant differences, reports prior to the Fall 2015 term are not being imported into the new course evaluation system. If you need reports or summary data for courses and/or instructors prior to Fall 2015, please contact us at course-evaluations@stanford.edu.

Differences between course reports

The following summarizes the differences between the course reports pre/post Fall 2015:

• The questions about instruction and learning and the wording of the response categories changed.
• The unit of evaluation is now the course and not the instructor, so courses with multiple primary instructors receive a single evaluation report.

Consequently, the reports from before 2015–16 and those starting in Autumn 2015–2016 should not be treated as equivalent and direct comparisons between the two should be avoided. It is therefore important that scores presented to show an instructor’s trajectory over time not mix reports from these two periods.

Caution is also required in referring to some backward-compatible reports generated by the previous course evaluation system:

• Area Means, although a valid comparison statistic for reports before 2015-2016, are invalid in reports starting in Autumn 2015-2016 and should be disregarded.
• With the introduction of custom questions, broad aggregate scores, such as the course “Overall” mean score (combining quality of course content and quality of teaching) or the WebOptics Summary (discontinued), are not valid calculations in reports starting Autumn 2015-2016.

End-term course feedback form differences in detail: