UHCL remains noncompliant with HB 2504

Every semester students are tasked with selecting the professors whose courses they wish to take. Often students look to reviews on websites like Rate My Professors for advice. Soon, however, students will have another resource at their disposal – the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) course evaluations.

Right now at UHCL, students complete their end-of-course evaluations and never see that information again. This is not the case for students at many other universities in the state of Texas. Universities such as the University of Houston, Texas State University and Texas Tech University – to name a few – all allow students to view a summary of past semesters’ course evaluations online.

This resource is something that is not currently offered at UHCL, despite it being mandated by Texas law for 10 years.

In 2009, the state of Texas adopted House Bill 2504, which mandates that “Institutions of higher education… shall conduct end-of-course evaluations of faculty and develop a plan to make evaluations available on the institution’s website.” As of publication, UHCL is not compliant with this section of the bill. However, UHCL Senior Vice President and Provost Steven Berberich said that UHCL should be soon.

“An ad-hoc committee of faculty senate has just submitted their recommendations on creating a core set of evaluation items that will be utilized in every course,” Berberich said. “They are proposing a standing committee that would include students to build the core evaluation module. I anticipate the committee will be formed this semester and, hopefully, complete their work in time for the evaluations to be available at the end of the spring semester.”

The course evaluation reports being made public will not include individual student’s comments. The reports will only include a summary of the numerical ratings of professors and their courses.

“The most beneficial information that students provide at end of the term evaluations are written comments,” said Professor of Sociology Michael McMullen.

Despite not including individual student comments, Student Government Association (SGA) Vice President of Outreach and Communication Ashlyn Vaughn said that the end-of-course evaluation reports will still be more beneficial than Rate My Professors.

“Rate My Professors has limited reviews, many of which are outdated,” Vaughn said. “Having fresh opinions from every student completing the course evaluations will give a more complete picture of the class and professor being examined.”

In the spring of 2019, UHCL transitioned from paper evaluations to online evaluations. Since this transition took place, however, the number of students completing their end-of-course evaluations has decreased.

“The completion of course evaluations is critical, not only for future students but also for the faculty who are teaching these courses,” Berberich said.

UHCL is just one of the many universities that use end-of-course evaluations as a factor in promotion-and-tenure decisions. While UHCL is working to become compliant with HB 2504, other universities are finding that end-of-course evaluations do not always garner accurate results.

Studies at the University of Oregon have found that students exhibit racial, gender and ethical biases when completing end-of-course evaluations. In addition to this, studies at several universities have found that some professors grade their students’ assignments easier in an attempt to gain higher course evaluation scores resulting in grade inflation.

Associate Professor of Economics Stephen Cotten said that in addition to grade inflation, end-of-course evaluations create an incentive for professors “to be popular instead of a good teacher.” Further, Cotten said students leaving specific suggestions for improvement on the end-of-course evaluations is beneficial to faculty.

These studies on student bias in end-of-course evaluations have led the University of Oregon to develop a three-tier evaluation system gathering data from students, peer professors, and the professors themselves. The University of Oregon began using this system in the spring 2017 semester.

The Association of American Universities (AAU) and other universities worldwide, including the University of Colorado Boulder and University College London, have also argued that it is time for universities to revamp their ideas regarding teaching excellence.

Course evaluations for the fall 2019 semester will be available to students to complete from Nov. 23 through Dec. 14 and can be completed here.