Everybody knows about Rate My Professor. Now, there’s TRACE — short for Teacher Rating Course Evaluation.
Later this month, Northeastern students will be asked to rate their teachers using the online tool that features in-depth questions to inspire more thoughtful feedback on their educational experience, according to a letter from TRACE Implementation Committee chair James Alan Fox.
“The quality of the feedback should really improve,” said Fox, Lipman Family professor of criminal justice. “Students will be able to see their comments and the comments of their peers almost immediately, and they can fill out the survey in a much more convenient time frame.”
Rather than the old-fashioned pencil-and-paper method used at the conclusion of Northeastern courses for years, this newer evaluation will give students time and privacy to develop thoughtful responses to a wider-range of “open-ended” questions, Fox said.
Students will be asked to complete their course evaluations between April 9 and 27, according to a memo. On April 29, faculty will be given access to the responses, and given until May 5 to respond. On May 12, the evaluations will be available to the entire university community, readable through the MyNEU portal.
In a report to the faculty, Fox described TRACE as an instrument that offers much more than previous evaluation methods, presenting students with a wide array of open-ended questions designed to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each course.
“We ask a variety of questions now, focusing on anything from the syllabus to books,” he said.
Susan Powers-Lee, executive vice provost and member of the TRACE committee, said the new evaluation tool has significant advantages over the older method.
“We have a wider range of questions concerning course content and instruction,” she said, adding that they should elicit more thoughtful feedback.
“(We have seen) evidence, as well as data from other universities’ experiences, that students provide more thoughtful input on the open-ended questions when using the on-line system,” Powers-Lee said.
The move to online evaluations came out of a Faculty Senate resolution in 2007 to replace the current Teacher-Course Evaluation (TCE) program with a redesigned and electronically administered TRACE system, according to Fox.
Other members of the TRACE committee who brought the new system to fruition are Kostia Bergman, associate professor of biology; Raymond Kinnunen, associate professor of international business and strategy; and Richard Mickool, executive director of Information Services.
— Susan Salk