Office of Evaluations and Exams - University of Michigan

The mid-semester feedback questionnaires used in Engineering courses this term contain questions drawn from three groups:

University-wide questions. The first four questions on the mid-semester forms also appear on most questionnaires developed for end-of-term course evaluation. Results on these items provide an overview of student reactions to the course, teacher, and the amount learned in the course. Departments often pay special attention to ratings on University-wide questions when they are included on end-of-term questionnaires.
Teaching improvement questions. The other rating questions are designed to help teachers find strengths and weaknesses in their teaching. The teaching improvement questions included on Engineering mid-semester questionnaires were devised by the Engineering Teaching Academy and the College of Engineering's Undergraduate Student Advisory Board.
Open-ended questions. These questions ask students to comment on class instruction and related matters. Student comments can sometimes help teachers find the reasons for their ratings.

Many teachers find it useful to look first at their median responses to TQ questions. The median gives the middle or typical response to each question. For E&E Teaching Questionnaires, the median is a value between 1.0 and 5.0. When all students respond "strongly agree" to a question, the class median is 5.0; when all students respond “strongly disagree,” the class median is 1.0. A value between these extremes can be interpreted as the point on a continuous scale below which 50 percent of all responses fall. Identification of questions with high medians may help a teacher find relative strengths in teaching; lower medians may indicate relative weaknesses.

It is important to note that most students at the University of Michigan give high ratings to their teachers and classes. Here, for example, are the median values that last year divided all University classes into the top, middle, and bottom quarters in terms of ratings.

Item	75% of classes above	50% of classes above	25% of classes above
1 Overall, this is an excellent course.	3.88	4.20	4.64
2 Overall, the instructor is an excellent teacher.	4.04	4.50	4.81
3 I am learning a great deal in this course.	3.90	4.22	4.64
4 I had a strong desire to take this course.	3.40	3.95	4.46

Many factors affect the ratings that teachers receive in their classes—including the interest that students have in taking a course, the level of the course, and the class size—so the above figures should not be construed as norms. They do indicate, however, that ratings for University of Michigan classes are typically high.

Many teachers find student comments most useful in finding strengths and weaknesses in a course. Student comments often reveal the reasons behind certain student ratings. It is an especially good idea to read the comments made by students who assign very favorable or unfavorable ratings to a class.

There is much more to interpreting rating results than is described here. You can find a fuller interpretive guide by visiting the E&E web site at www.umich.edu/~eande/tq/.