Opinion: You Need to Fill Out Your Course Evaluations
Giving course feedback is anonymous, a good place to vent and it helps professors with future job applications — you can take five minutes to do them.
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by Aksha Mittapalli
This story was originally published on New York University’s Washington Square News.
A laptop screen displaying a webpage that indicates the course feedback website for New York University.Finals are right around the corner. As we get buried in assignments, our inboxes overflow with unread emails. In the flood of end-of-semester messages, one particular email fails to pique students’ interest: “Reminder: Submit your Course Feedback!”
Administered at the most inconvenient time of the year, course evaluations seem relatively optional, completed only when professors denote time for them at the end of our final class, or as a gift we bestow only to our favorites. I understand that it is normal for course evaluations — now Course Feedback, thanks to an NYU name revamp — to get lost in our ever-growing list of responsibilities at the end of the semester. But we must take those five minutes from our schedules to complete them, even for the professors that we don’t have particularly strong feelings about.
Course feedback consists of final surveys provided to students by NYU to gauge students’ reception of instructors’ teaching style, class structure and general pedagogy of certain teachers and courses. These surveys are essential in providing an anonymous and honest review of a professor’s course and teaching, and they are an excellent resource for students to give feedback to contribute to strengthening the course for future students.
Read the rest of the story at Washington Square News.