Course Evaluations as a Means for Educational Improvements

A general evaluation of any education shall be based on the educations ability to meet defined goals and objectives. If such an evaluation is performed continuously it can be viewed as a relative quality measure. A main task when evaluating the whole education will be an evaluation of the individual courses. This may comprise of several parts: A lecturer evaluation/report, a student evaluation/report of the course and the lecturer(s), the number of students having passed the course, the grade average and the distribution of the grades.

At DTU (The Technical University of Denmark), students have for more than 10 years been evaluating the courses they attend. During the last 5 years, this evaluation has been completed electronically as an integral part of our CampusNet computing and course administration system. The electronic version has opened up for further analysis of the evaluation data and extraction of important information; this will be the main focus of this paper. In the evaluation of courses, the students are given seven different questions and for each question they can select between 5 different answers. Each answer is given a certain weight, and by summing up the weights for the selected answers and making an average over all the students, each course obtains a utility value. A similar set of questions and answers exists for all course lecturers. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).