With the semester nearing its end, students are starting to see emails from “UNM Course Feedback” urging them to evaluate their courses and instructors from the fall semester.
The email reads, in part: “Student feedback is highly valued and extremely important! Student feedback provided through course evaluations is crucial in order for Faculty to improve their instruction as well as other aspects of their courses. All responses are completely anonymous.”
However, students had questions about just how anonymous and vital those course evaluations are, with UNM having transitioned from paper, in-class evaluations to online evaluation surveys two years ago.
While the questions are not different, the means of cataloging the questions are. Students must log in with their UNM ID’s and passwords through UNM Learn or EvaluationKIT. Now that students must login, the process of anonymity is less clear than handing in a nameless form.
“Kind of and kind of not. We have to log in with our Net ID therefore I don’t know if they actually are anonymous,” said senior communication major student Krystal Romero, when asked if she felt like she can be honest on her evaluations. “If I’m the first one to submit it, won’t they be able to tell?”
Romero recently completed all her course evaluations for the fall 2016 semester and brings up what other students have wondered: are the evaluations truly anonymous?
“A student NetID is necessary for authentication and assignment of appropriate surveys, but response data is not associated with the student for instructors to view in the application. It is possible for students to reveal their identity if they answer qualitative responses in a manner that would be recognizable to the instructor,” assured Duane Arruti, chief information officer for UNM IT, and technical analyst Aaron Baca in an emailed statement.
The Daily Lobo went to Electronic Survey and Election Support to find out exactly how the “response data is not associated with the student.” However, we were told they were not allowed to speak with reporters and directed us to the director of Customer Services for UNM IT.
Jason Slocum, who works in Information Technologies at UNM, said, “I feel that there is potential (course feedback) confidentiality risks because although we have anti-virus, there have been previous breaches to the UNM mainframe in the past.”
Some students, on the other hand, felt comfortable with the online course feedback system.
“Overall, I feel that you can be honest in evaluations to a certain extent. What I mean by that is that evaluations should be helpful with honest feedback so the professors can understand and make the adjustments they see fit,” said senior East Asian studies major Kylee San Miguel. “I like to think that it all is truly anonymous.”
Some professors offer incentives or extra credit to encourage students to take the evaluations. Some students wondered too how they can prove they took the surveys without revealing their answers.
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“UNM’s Course Feedback application keeps track of who took the survey. In addition, the student is sent a confirmation that they submitted the survey and can forward to instructors as necessary, without identifying information about how they responded,” Arruti and Baca said.
In addition to anonymity, students also raised concerns about whether their time spent on the evals are worth it.
Faculty members are not required to access the students’ course feedback and there is not a log on how many faculty members access their course feedback, according to Greg Heileman, associate provost for Academic Affairs.
“In general, faculty are not required to access their course feedback reports, but I can’t imagine why a faculty would not want to view this information — i.e., it would be strange for a faculty to facilitate this feedback in his/her course, and then not view it. We don’t keep track of how many faculty access their course feedback, but it is expected that faculty will include this information in tenure and promotion packages,” Heileman said.
Romero voiced apprehension on the fact that faculty don’t have to read the evaluations.
“What’s the point then?” she said. “If they aren’t going to take the time to read them we shouldn’t have to complete them.”
Shelby Perea is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at skperea@unm.edu or on Twitter @shelby_perea.
