Students' Ratings of Instruction

Abstract

SOME experience with students' L ratings, and some reflection on them, may suggest an answer to the question, Should students rate and report upon the instruction they receive? In a summary of a quick survey of evaluation of faculty services, W. W. Charters reported in this JOURNAL in December, 1940, that students were being asked to rate their courses or teachers, or both, at many colleges and universities.1 More recently, the number of references in the Education Index shows that students' ratings are used in many public schools. In the spring of I944, the Smith College faculty voted that a committee be appointed to study and make recommendations about students' ratings of courses. The authors of this article were appointed to this task, and we wrote to the presidents of 67 colleges and universities, asking about their experience with such ratings. Fifty-one replies were received. They indicate no system of ratings at 26 institutions, and one or more systems, some of them used only for a time or for part of the institution, at 25, including 5 named in the I940 study. The institutions reporting no ratings are: