Students need more opportunity for course feedback

Students choose to come to college to further their education. Part of that includes taking their educations into their own hands to get their desired outcomes: degrees.

Holding your education in your hands requires students to choose classes and the instructors that will be teaching those classes. We understand, sometimes a specific time slot will take priority over who is teaching the class, but for those of us who find a good instructor important to our decisions, The Advocate would like to see more options for students to have information on what kind of class they’re getting into.

Currently, many students are resorting to ratemyprofessors.com in order to find a suitable instructor. The website itself cannot be considered ultimately reliable because first off, it includes a “hotness” rating and secondly, it seems that a lot of teacher reviews are on one side or the other: the instructor was either absolutely horrible or belongs in the realm of Gods as far as teaching is concerned.

Another problem with ratemyprofessors.com is that reviews of instructors don’t have to come from a specific school base. If an instructor teaches at multiple colleges, students who review them may not be from Mt. Hood Community College. While this widens the pool of reviews, every school has it’s own community that may accept one style of teaching over another.

MHCC offers evaluations on a random basis through e-mail, but not for all of a student’s instructors in a given term. Formerly, the college offered written evaluations on the basis that instructors volunteered to be reviewed.

When evaluations are set up on a website, the teachers must first opt-in to do the evaluations, deciding if they would like their courses evaluated and if so, which courses they would like evaluated. Once they have decided that, the evaluations are sent out to students. The students are then only able to evaluate a course if their teacher has approved it.

This leaves students with limited ability to give feedback because many teachers may opt-out of this process.

The Advocate feels that students would benefit from having more opportunity to evaluate and give feedback when a teacher may be lacking in teacher to student communication skills.

Currently the MHCC valuations received from students are not made public. This gives students no outlet to take a hands-on approach to their education by having a reliable review of a Mt. Hood specific instructor by fellow peers.
The Advocate would like to know what is being done with these evaluations and how many students are taking advantage of them. Are they really doing us any good?

The Advocate’s proposed solution to this would be to have reviews sent out by e-mail to every registered student for every instructor they’ve taken for that term and have a guided evaluation to take them through the process.
Questions would need to have an open-ended portion where students could write their own comments either in addition to or separate from any potential multiple choice questions.

Following submissions, the school would do well to publish the reviews for the benefit of the student body.

It would also give the instructors the opportunity to see the impact of their teaching style and how well it is working for students taking their classes in a reliable setting and make adjustments as needed.