By Brooke Moody–
This semester, students can expect changes in when they can view their final grades.
Due to a low return rate of course evaluations, U of L now requires students to either complete all of their evaluations or manually opt-out of them in order to view their final grades. Students who do not take any action will have to wait until 48 hours after the last day of finals to view their grades.
The U of L Office of Institutional Research and Planning created the initiative to encourage more students to fill out their course evaluations.
Other practices for garnering responses include providing faculty and students with incentives and making the surveys mobile-friendly. But after these incentives only culled at 53-55 percent response rate, administrators felt more needed to be done.
“Increasing the number of students participating in the course evaluation process improves the culture of assessment for the university,” Vice Provost of Institutional Research Bob Goldstein said.
Student attitude towards course evaluations reflected the low response rate.
“I usually don’t do them unless I have a problem with the professor,” student Marissa Middleton said. Now that the evaluations are required to view final grades, Middleton said she is more likely to do them.
Faculty have been asked to post final grades in PeopleSoft instead of Blackboard.
“I had one professor and she didn’t put grades in Blackboard and I never knew what grades I had and it was nerve-wracking,” senior Krista Prak said. “If we don’t allow professors to put grades in Blackboard then it will harm the student because they won’t be able to gauge their performance in the class and they’ll have to go to the professor to find out how they did.”
“It’s almost like a waiting game, and it’s a stressor when students already have enough to stress about,” Prak said.
Course evaluations are available until Dec. 19.
