Vice president of instruction, Kimberly Hurns. Lilly Merritt | Washtenaw Voice
By Danny Villalobos
Staff Writer
As the deadline to fill out Student Opinion Questionnaires approaches, students may wonder how the evaluation system works.
Previously, WCC had a flagging system for full-time faculty, but negotiations with the WCC Education Association got rid of it, according to vice president of instruction, Kimberly Hurns.
“When it comes to the SOQs, for me, I ask ‘how can we make this more of a feedback loop?’ rather than something to be fearful of,” said Hurns.
Now the question remains: do full-time professors find the SOQs useful? That depends on who you talk to.
“They are a way of getting confidential feedback on what worked and didn’t work,” said Mary Mullalond, full-time English professor.
Mullalond is one of many professors who uses the SOQs to adjust her approach to courses.
“I’m always looking for comments that give me a way to improve how I teach and the assignments I hand out,” she said.
Mullalond said sometimes she receives outlier comments, but they aren’t usually enough to shift her class unless more students feel that way.
Hava Levitt-Phillips, a full time English instructor, said she reads the SOQs, but finds very little feedback in the “last chunk of years” to prompt her to make changes in her courses. Instead, she gives her class an opportunity for reflective workshops to find what worked and didn’t work with a particular unit.
Despite having feedback opportunities in her classroom, she said it’s “always good to have a time where you can give feedback privately.”
Yet, Levitt-Phillips does have concerns when it comes to the SOQs, primarily with how accurate students are about their experiences on the evaluation—especially for part-time professors, who are held by a different standard than full-time faculty.
Elisabeth Thoburn, a full-time humanities instructor, expressed similar concerns about the SOQs.
“I know how SOQs can fluctuate,” said Thoburn. Thoburn was once a department chair who reviewed SOQ evaluations. “I teach the same section three times over; in one section I’m in the 90 percentile, and in the next section I’m in the 25 percentile; how could that be? That shouldn’t be possible. I’m the same teacher, with the same attitude, same work and same lectures. Yet, here I am, it’s happened to me; and that’s a reflection on how the class is, but not me.”
Thoburn finds the SOQs to be “an institutionalized way of measuring how I’m doing.”
“I have to comply with doing it and I’m making the best of it,” she said.
Nevertheless, the SOQs do influence the trajectory of her courses, but only when students complete them.
“I don’t think the bubbles on the SOQs are actually as productive compared to the spaces where students can write down their opinions on,” said Thoburn. She’s also skeptical on how the evaluations can be used for measuring a whether a teacher is good or not.
Some steps have been taken to make the SOQs more helpful for professors.
For instance, the SOQs are available on Blackboard for all courses through a software program called Blue. Pop-up reminders to complete the SOQs appear every time students login to Blackboard, once they’re available to fill out.
“As we grew our online courses, we didn’t get good response rates from students, it was 2-8 percent back then,” said Hurns. “The implementation of Blue brought up the response rates of the online courses significantly.”
Despite the reminders, Thoburn feels that students are “good at ignoring pop-ups.”
Since January this year, WCC implemented additional questions to the SOQs, according to Hurns, which offers a chance for separate departments to ask their own questions on whether a certain aspect of the program is effective.
For example, the business department will have questions unique to their field, while the art department will have question that pertain to their field.
“I’d like the ability to control the questions that we ask, because a lot questions also apply to other classes,” said Levitt-Phillips.
