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Requesting FCQ Data

NOTE: Most data are now available online. See the Data Requester.

• e-mail to fcq@Colorado.EDU
• phone (303) 492-7069
• 15 UCB
• Regent 1B29

We ask that you

1. Read the FCQ Statistical Details entry on our web pages
2. Read this section carefully before contacting us
3. Let us know that you want files or reports. A staff member will then contact you to discuss the details of your request.
4. Give us plenty of lead time.

INFORMATION AVAILABLE

1. Year and term
2. Campus, college, FCQ department, course subject, and course number (can be used to specify level as graduate vs. undergraduate or upper vs. lower division)
3. Course activity type (lecture, seminar, lab, etc.) and most recent course title (both from fall 1988 on only)
4. Instructor group (called I_GROUP in our files; A, B, or C from fall 1990 on; A vs. B-C prior to that), where
   • A : tenured and tenure-track
   • B : other primary instructors, including GPTI, adjunct, visiting, and honoraria
   • C : teaching assistants.
5. Number of forms requested and returned and percent returned = return rate.
6. Percentage of returned forms with A-F responses on the course rating question. This figure is not stored for other questions because it's usually over 90% for all questions except the two on diversity (see below).
7. Percentage of forms requested that were returned AND had A-F responses on the course rating; this represents the overall response rate.
8. Instructor name and ID
9. Number of group and individual optional questions used
10. Average ratings for each of the 12 standard questions. Our short names for the questions are shown in caps in the list below.
    1. PRESENT Presentation of course material
    2. EXPLAIN Explanations of assignments
    3. ASSIGN Relevance of assignments to course
    4. FAIRNESS Fairness of grading policies
    5. WORKLOAD Workload relative to the credit given
    6. DIV-STU Instructor's treatment of ethnic minority and female students
    7. DIV-ISSUE How the course addressed issues and information about women and ethnic minorities
    8. ACCESS Accessibility of instructor
    9. MOTIVE How well the instructor motivated students to explore the subject further
    10. LEARN Course as a learning experience
    11. COURSE This course, compared to all your other university courses
    12. INSTRUCTOR This instructor, compared to all your other university instructors

11. Percentage of returned forms with A-F responses on the student diversity and issue diversity questions
12. Section standard deviations for the course and instructor questions (on file for fall 1992 on; we can calculate for any question for this and prior terms).
13. More detailed information, including response frequencies, raw responses, and responses to optional questions, is also available for most terms.

CONSIDERING YOUR REQUEST

1. What you're going to do with the information you get. We can fill your needs far better if we know what they are!
2. What group of course sections you're interested in. Look especially at numbers 1-8 above. For example, do you want data for
   1. all terms?
   2. a particular instructor only?
   3. what subjects or departments or colleges?
   4. all course levels? For many types of analysis, graduate courses should be excluded.
   5. all activity types? Should labs and recitations be excluded?
   6. all instructor groups, group A only, or what?
   7. courses of all sizes, or only those with over or under a specified number of sheets requested or returned?
   8. sections where the return rate or response rate is under 50%? under 60%? These can be excluded if you like.

3. What groups of courses you do want to keep separate in your report or file? For example, should instructor groups A and B be combined or separated? Should each term be shown separately?
4. Do you need results shown for individual instructors?
5. What measures are you interested in? The course rating? Instructor rating? Both? Other ratings? Workload?
6. Do you want listings of sections? In what order? With what identifiers? Distributions? Averages? Standard deviations? What?
7. How should averages be calculated--we MUST know this before we can calculate any averages for you! We can do this two ways:
   1. We can add up average ratings from all sections in the group(s) you specify so that each section contributes equally to the resulting group average. This is the UNWEIGHTED method that is used to calculate the department and campus averages shown on the section reports from fall 1990 on. This method is appropriate when you want to characterize a group of SECTIONS.
   2. We can weight each section by the number of sheets returned. This is the WEIGHTED method. In this method, larger sections contribute more to the group average. Because these sections often have lower section averages, the weighted group average is often--but NOT always--lower than the unweighted group average. This method is appropriate when you want to characterize a group of STUDENTS--that is, those who rated a group of sections.

8. If you want the data as a computer file: What format should the file be in? On electronic mail? In a microcomputer format such as Lotus 1-2-3, ASCII, Macintosh Excel, SAS, SPSS, or dBase? Do you have someone who can handle the file and extract the information you want?

gp -- l:\www\fcq\requests.html was last updated 8/20/99

Last revision 04/08/05