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Guide to Using Faculty Course Questionnaire Results

• students for selecting courses and instructors,
• instructors for improving their teaching, and
• deans and department chairs for promotion, tenure, salary, and course-assignment decisions.

The web pages Results by College, Subject, and Course number and Results by Instructor show how students rated their instructors and courses during the last three years. In "Results by College ..." Courses are listed by college, subject or department, and course number, similar to the way courses are listed in the Registration Handbook and Schedule of Courses. However, there are no categories within a department's course listing in this guide. More recent semesters are listed first. Controlled-enrollment sections (Honors, Residential Academic Programs, etc.) are marked by an asterisk(*) next to the course number. Actual section numbers are listed at the right side, before the Course Title. In "Results by Instructor" all courses taught by an instructor during the last three years are listed together, sorted by course number within term, with more recent terms listed first. Summer term courses are not included in either listing.

Remember that several factors in addition to quality of instruction may influence the ratings. These include department, class size, class level, and whether the class is required or an elective.

Here's what the abbreviations at the top of each page mean.

Course #

Subject area, course number, and section number

Term

Semester this section was given. 'S' = Spring, 'F' = Fall. (No Summer sections are listed.)

Instructor

Instructor name ("Smith/Jones" indicates a team-taught course)

Number Enrl

Number enrolled in this section of the course.

Number Ret'd

Number of completed FCQs returned

Course Title

Full course title

Average ratings are based on a scale of A = very good to F = very poor.

Course Rating

"Rate this course compared to all your other university courses."

Instructor Rating

"Rate this instructor compared to all your other university instructors."

Fair Grading

"Rate fairness of grading policies."

Accessibility

"Rate accessibility of instructor."

Workload

"Rate workload relative to the credit given." For this item the scale is 1 = too light, 5 = OK, 9 = too heavy.

Student Diversity

"Rate instructor's treatment of ethnic minority and female students."

Issue Diversity

"Rate how the course addressed issues and information about women and ethnic minorities." (This is frequently missing on over half of returned forms.)

• No ratings are shown for a section if fewer than half of the completed forms contained responses to the Course Rating item.
• If either of the Diversity items was answered by fewer than half of those responding, it is not shown, regardless of the overall response rate.
• Chemistry LAB sections and Chem Engineering 1221 sections taught by TAs are entirely omitted, because those departments discourage students in those sections from answering the standard FCQ questions, making any ratings unreliable.

PBA:gjp -- l:\www\fcq\ppgintro.html was last updated 04/08/05.

Last revision 04/08/05