UNM's new course-evaluation forms are getting mixed reviews from students and faculty.
The ICES evaluation forms have been replaced by Individual Development and Educational Assessment forms, which are used at universities across the country.
Sophomore Kelsey Carrillo said she remembers the ICES as a more effective way to evaluate courses.
"The IDEA forms are really bad. I feel like some of the questions on them, and the way the rating was - like the mostly true, mostly false - was just stupid," she said. "I definitely think the old ones were better. On the old ones, they type in the questions, and the questions related to the course much more than the new ones do."
The IDEA forms differ from the ICES in the way questions are worded and by the addition of student self-evaluation questions. This portion includes questions such as, "As a rule, I put forth more effort in class than other students."
The answers on IDEA forms are also weighted according to answers provided by instructors, said Karen Majors, academic advisor for the Sociology Department.
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Majors said the majority of professors dislike the course evaluations, as they have to submit related forms to specify which aspects of their classes are most important to be rated.
"The way the instructor fills out the form is that they have to fill out and rate at least six areas and decide whether it is important, minimally important, or not important at all for these specific goals," she said.
However, students might find some aspects of a course more important than their instructors do, Majors said. This discrepancy could cause some areas to be overlooked, and instructors are not graded on the questions they deem unimportant, she said.
"This makes the IDEA a nonstandard form," Majors said. "In the ICES, they would fill out their name and class number, and all the questions were basically the same. They all got weighted the same. The IDEA form tells them how to weight the questions the students answer."
Jason Ward, an adjunct professor in the Architecture Department, said the IDEA form is an effective way to evaluate instructors and courses based on the specific goals of a class.
"It seems like a really standard evaluation to me. I think the idea is to take the student form and compare them to the instructor forms," he said. "I could actually see the faculty form being helpful, because it puts the student form into context - was it a lecture or a studio? It helps to verify what type of class the students were in."
Instructors are able to choose between two forms and sets of multiple choice answers that students can use to evaluate the course, Majors said.
She said the course evaluations are useful to teachers and that faculty is not affected by negative comments from students.
"They are taken into consideration, but they are not going to lose their job over it," she said.
However, evaluations are used more specifically to monitor instructors who have only a few classes or have not been employed for long, Majors said.
"The (IDEA forms) are one of the only instruments that we have to measure the performance of part-time instructors, to see how they are doing," she said.
