Fact Page for Instructors: Fall 2009 Online Subject Evaluations

Getting Evaluated

In the pilot phase, you will be recruited by your department to participate. In order to take part, you need to have both a Kerberos ID (an MIT network authentication identifier) and a browser that has MIT certificates (which allows access to secure MIT Web services) installed. If you don't have a Kerberos ID, see instructions on how to get one. If you have a Kerberos ID but need certificates, you can download them from web.mit.edu/certficates.

View a list of subjects that have already been evaluated online.

Managing Evaluation Questions

Though departments will continue to use the questions from the HASS and Science/Engineering paper evaluation forms (you can view these forms at: web.mit.edu/acadinfo/sse/samples.html), you now have the option of asking specific questions of your students about teaching, sections, and the subject. The questions can be in any format — open-ended, scalar, numeric, etc. If you would like to add extra questions to the online survey, please submit them to your department administrator before November 20.

Because survey responses are intended to be anonymous, you should not ask for information that could help you identify the respondents. For example, it is not appropriate to ask students to provide demographic information such as class year, gender, or race.

See information from the Teaching & Learning Laboratory on designing effective survey questions (excerpted from Overview of Issues in Assessment & Evaluation).

The Evaluation Period

Students may evaluate subjects at any time during the evaluation period (see Survey Dates). Even if they take the evaluations on the first day of the evaluation period, they are free to go back and change their answers right up until the last day.

Response Rates

Evaluation reminders will be sent via email to students who haven't completed evaluations and will contain a web link to the online survey.

Response rates for evaluations will be sent to departments and instructors during the evaluation window. You can help boost response rates by emphasizing to your students how important the evaluations are to you and your department, and by letting them know that they can view the quantitative results online at web.mit.edu/subjectevaluation/results.html. Some instructors have found that asking students to bring their laptops to class to take the evaluation yields very high response rates.

Viewing Results

Online evaluation reports for Fall 2009 subjects will be available in January. Students will view only summarized quantitative results, while instructors will view open-ended comments and detailed quantitative results. You will need MIT certificates installed on your browser to view results; if you don’t have them, go to web.mit.edu/certificates.

Getting Help

For technical problems (logging in, viewing results, or any other technical assistance matter) contact se-help@mit.edu. General comments and questions about this project can be directed to the project team: se-wtw@mit.edu.

See Survey

The Online Subject Evaluation User Guide contains screen prints and instructions for navigating through the online survey.