Course evaluation - information for students

Teachers need feedback

To further develop a course or to assess their own teaching competence, teachers need your direct feedback.

As experts on the learning process within a course you have attended, you can tell teachers what worked well for you, what you felt was missing and what you would like to see in future visitors to this course.

At first glance, course evaluation seems to serve only the lecturer. In fact, however, its aim is to improve teaching as a whole. By giving your teachers feedback, they can in turn check their own teaching and improve it when things go wrong. The departments can also work with the results.

Benefits for teachers::

    • Does the teaching concept work?
    • Was the structure of the content comprehensible?
    • Were complex issues well illustrated and understood?
    • Were the materials provided sufficient and well prepared?
    • Was the teacher easily accessible to the students and were questions answered?
    • Was the level of the course appropriate?
    • How satisfied are the students with their learning success?
  • The answers to these and other questions help teachers to assess the quality of a course, indicate potential need for further training and thus contribute to improving the study situation in the long term.

Objective and appreciative feedback on teaching can be the start of an exchange between students and teachers.

Content can be reflected on together and mutual expectations exchanged.

In the guideline on course evaluation, teachers are recommended to communicate with students about the evaluation results.

However, teachers are not obliged to do this and are free to design an exchange on the results.

At the departmental level, results of the course evaluation are used:

  • For quality assurance of courses.
  • To coordinate course content in modules.
  • To support teachers in their qualification.
  • For personnel decisions, e.g. for teaching assistants.
  • To identify outstanding teaching or teaching innovation for teaching awards.

In most departments, the course evaluation is carried out in a time window of two weeks. Via a link, a QR code or in other ways, the lecturers will inform you of the access to the evaluation form – at best this happens in the course, or it can also happen via moodle, e-mail, system message or by other means.

The guidelines for course evaluation at the TU Darmstadt define that the departments must evaluate all courses with more than 10 participants every 3 semesters (“full survey”).

Outside of this full survey, the departments decide individually whether and, if so, which courses are to be evaluated.

So some departments evaluation the majority of their courses every semester. Others participate in the LVE only for the full survey.

The recommendation is to evaluate a course when two thirds of the courses have already been attended.

Some teachers would like to evaluate earlier in order to be able to implement improvements during the course based on the results.

Others, on the other hand, want students to have heard as many courses as possible and evaluate just before the lecture period ends.

But basically it is the departments that determine when courses are to be evaluated.

If your course is to be evaluated, you will receive a link or QR code and a solution from the teacher. Ideally, this should even happen during the course. With the help of this information, you can access the questionnaire for your course.

Teachers usually receive the evaluation results within 48 hours after the end of the evaluation period.

Teachers are advised to discuss the results with students in an appropriate way. Many do, some do not. However, this does not mean that the results are not worked with and the teacher does not work with your feedback.

According to the guidelines for the area of course evaluation, the teaching and study committee of a department can request the evaluation of a course.

Therefore, if you wish to have a course evaluated, the best way is to contact this committee. This can also be done through the student council.

Notes on data protection

Participation in the course evaluation is voluntary.

All data entered in the questionnaires are summarised in the form of a report for the teachers. It is therefore not possible for teachers to link individual evaluations, e.g. with certain free text comments.

Courses in which fewer than 6 people took part in the evaluation are not evaluated. In the case of 6-9 participants in the evaluation, personal details such as gender, subject and degree are removed from the results report.