Proposal for an A&S Course Evaluation Web Site Faculty Meeting February 21, 2006

Advantages of the Proposed A&S Web Site Postings would occur with greater accuracy, reliability and promptness compared to the current SGA web site. A VUnet ID will be required for access. Improved management of the site with appropriate restrictions governing access. A disclaimer will be added relating to the importance of looking at several sources of information in making a decision about a given course.

Formatting Results for Questions 1-9 and 15 will be included for each course, except as noted below. Data will be presented as histograms rather than means and SDs. The number of students enrolled and the number responding will be displayed. Access will be permitted to one course at the time. Data mining will be difficult. Goal of making 3 academic years of data available to students.

Exceptions Written comments by students will not be included. A course will not be included if there is less than a 50% response or fewer than five students responding. A junior faculty member may petition the Dean through his or her department chair to withhold course evaluation data. Any faculty member may also petition the Dean through his or her department chair for compelling reasons (e.g. family emergency, illness, newly designed course, taking over a course in mid-semester, etc.)

Other Vanderbilt Colleges have found our Online Course Evaluation System and our proposed Course Evaluation Web Site useful and are planning on or considering adopting them. Peabody College School of Engineering Blair School of Music Owen School of Management Vanderbilt Law School

Peer Comparisons Yes, publicly accessible: Rice University University of Chicago Yes, password-protected: Columbia University (some departments) Georgetown University Johns Hopkins University Northwestern University Washington University in St. Louis Yale University (50% of questions are accessible to students)

Peer Comparisons Student managed and password-protected: Brown University Harvard University Princeton University Stanford University University of Pennsylvania University of Virginia Vanderbilt University

No Student Access to Course Evaluations: Peer Comparisons No Student Access to Course Evaluations: Cornell University Dartmouth University Duke University* Emory University Notre Dame* University of California-Berkeley* UCLA University of Michigan * online web site under discussion

Features of the Web Site Test web site