Affiliation:
1. Louisiana State University
Abstract
Issues of import to students' evaluations include accountability, improvement of teaching, anonymity, meaning and motivation of such evaluations, and validity and reliability. The very brief Student's Evaluation of Course, an entirely anonymous rating scale, is presented here for use only by the instructor, not for administrative purposes. Validity has been described previously. In this study, students' ratings of the six course-relevant items across a period of 35 years by one professor's students show that the ratings were affected by objectively determinable external events. Six specific hypotheses were set up and tested; five of these were borne out.