Free-form Comments in TRACE
The TRACE survey has several questions that students answer with free-form comments. Since the survey is taken on line these comments can be provided to students as an aid to choosing courses and instructors. Student comments must conform to university appropriate use policy (item 29 on http://www.infoservices.neu.edu/aup.html). Several steps have been taken to ensure that the comments are appropriate:1. Comments are filtered by the CoursEval system to remove obscenities and other inappropriate words and phrases.
2. Faculty will be able to review their own evaluation reports, including student comments, before they are published to the university community. Generally, faculty will have access to their own results one day after grades are due through MyTRACE on their MyNEU portals. This web application allows faculty to customize, export and/or print their reports. After reviewing the student feedback from TRACE, faculty may use the redaction request form (see navigation panel at left) to request redaction of any comments that harass, threaten, defame, slander or otherwise fall outside the appropriate use policy.
Decisions about redactions must always balance the concerns of our hard-working and well-meaning faculty with the importance of self-expression by our hard-working and enthusiastic students. Faculty are encouraged to remember that some less than perfect comments actually show that our system is honest. It is often not worth worrying about one or a few outliers, since constructive, thoughtful comments generally carry more weight than an angry outburst.
Here are some general guidelines that we follow:
* anything that is racist, sexist, etc. - that is, any attacks on individuals which are also an attack on the community, will be redacted.
* comments that intimate professional impropriety (favoritism, harassment, discrimination, dishonesty etc.) will be redacted - not because these are not important but because they should be dealt with in other official ways.
* comments in which students speak for other students, rather than themselves, will be redacted.
* as long as a student is expressing his or her own feeling about something we will not make changes based on a different interpretation of the "facts". (For example, if a student says the faculty member was mean or inconsiderate, we assume s/he is expressing an opinion rather than a fact. Similarly if the student says they did not learn anything, or even were not taught anything).
* we encourage students to be civil - but will not redact material just because it is angry or unkind.