Hi everyone,
Following up on our discussion after Jackie’s presentation, here are the evaluation forms Modern Languages uses — one for language courses, the other for literature and civilization courses. The questions about student self-evaluation are near the end of each form. DML Lower Eval Form (1000-3215) DML Upper Eval Form (above 3215)
Herta
Challenges in Teaching 
My dept chair is very interested in these. May I ask what the response rate was?
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Our response rate for student evaluations in Modern Languages is very high, but that is also only because we are all scheduled a time DURING CLASS when we take our students to the computer lab and have them complete the evaluations. Without doing this during class time (and following up with the students who are not in class that day) I don’t think our response rate would be higher than the university average. At least with regard to the written comments, in my last two GER 1110 sections, 65% of those who completed the evaluation provided written comments on the instructor, 56% on the course materials, and only 43% on the self evaluation.
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How honest do the students *seem* about the self-eval?
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At the 3000 & 4000 levels, most take it VERY seriously. This past fall, I had some heart-wrenching confession-type comments like this one: “I definitely could have done better in this class. I really tried, but my life just isn’t working out the way I planned and unfortunately that bled into my coursework. I was stressed, and I spent the entire semester barreling through with almost no sleep, because I had so much homework in all of my classes that I had no time to sleep. I also had a few extremely unfortunate things directly affect me this semester, which definitely took a toll on my mindset. But I did try my best, and I have gotten much better at the language as a result, even if I didn’t always do so well on exams and assignments. However, even they have improved tremendously from the beginning of the semester.”
Adi would have a better sense than I on how seriously 1000 and 2000 level students take this. From peer evals, I’ve seen an occasional “I’m awesome” or similar throw-away comment, but that’s not the norm.
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These are ACTUAL student responses to the “self-evaluation” open-question on the course evaluations. There are copied directly from the evaluations, so this will give you a good idea of the honesty of the students.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
adi
Elementary German 1 (1110):
1) I believe I’m doing well in class, but could be doing better based on myself not the instructor.
2) I expected myself to do better in this purse unfortunately I was not able to give it all the time it needed due to my heavy and challenging course load this course then took less of a precedent since it was not part of my major. This may hurt my GPA in the long run but i put my study time into other classes that needed it more
3) I feel i could of done a lot better in the class. Language was never easy for me so i needed to apply myself more which i feel like i did not do. Even though i went to class everyday and did my homework learning german was not easy. in the future i feel like i need to study more and really try and learn everything i can to improve my grade for this course
4) I feel like I had room to improve but for the most part, I put a lot of time, energy, and a reasonable amount of stress into doing the homework to the best of my ability. My only regret is that I could have studied a little bit more.
5) I was an ok student
6) I could’ve done my homework a bit more frequently.
7) I love German! I should’ve worked harder, but I enjoyed the class and I’m glad I have one more semester! I think i did well adapting to the idea of learning german and now know what to look forward to in pursuing the language. I would have done better if I was more dilligent i think i did well in this course. i hope to get a low A
Business German (3215):
1) I feel like I tried my best a good 90% of the time, so I except to receive a decent grade. I do wish that I tried that much harder the other 10% of the time so my German language skills would have improved grammatically and not just factually.
2) In the beginning my participation was good, but my desire to do better severely diminished during the duration of the semester. I despised going to the class because I felt like this class was not going to benefit me at all in the future. It is ironic because this is actually probably the most important class the department offers.
3) Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to commit as much time to this class as I would have liked. But I really enjoyed taking it, and put in as much as I could when I had time. Even though I’m a 4th year German student, and the class was 3000-level, I felt appropriately challenged. I was happy to be able to learn about German professional culture. It advanced my German skills.
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