One teacher evaluation during a semester at California State University, Long Beach is not enough, according to Associated Students, Inc. senate.
The ASI senate passed a resolution Wednesday to introduce new online professor and instructor evaluations that will be conducted throughout a semester.
The online Student Evaluations of Teaching will allow students to provide feedback for their professors anonymously and will be conducted every three weeks.
“This resolution is really pushing teachers to allow this electronic way of getting feedback from their students,” ASI Sen. Chris Myrter said.
The resolution states that students will fill out and submit the online SET “anonymously through a survey option on a secure third party website.”
The professors and instructors will be encouraged to use the evaluations but will not be required to.
The online SET will be conducted on a third party website, similar to BeachBoard, and will use a survey to understand if students are engaging in the classroom, reading required textbooks and allowing students a platform to provide constructive criticism.
The online SET will not replace the current summative teacher evaluations called Student Perception of Teachers.
According to CSULB’s website, the purpose of evaluations is to “provide information to evaluate and improve instructional effectiveness.”
ASI Sen. Gee Moon suggested that an additional summative evaluation be conducted in the middle of the semester to provide the department chair with student concerns.
“If this is up to [the professors] it really just stops at what they want,” Moon said to the Senate. “This will give them a chance to fix something during the semester.”
Jeff Jarvis, the CSULB Faculty Representative, said that the problem with introducing another form summative evaluation would be the speed of receiving the feedback.
“I usually get my spring evaluations near the end of June beginning of July, which means there wouldn’t be a lot of time to make any adjustments for the spring semester,” Jarvis said.
Jarvis said that in order for professors to view the mid-semester evaluations, they would have to be conducted early on in the semester.
“It is probably going to log jam to put these all together and get them back to the professors,” Jarvis said.
ASI Sen. Joshua Wong said that adding another summative evaluation during the middle of the semester would be redundant, as the online SET would provide the professors the mid-semester feedback.
According to the resolution, the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at CSULB uses 200,000 pieces of paper to conduct the SPOT evaluations. SET evaluations would not use printed materials.
