COURSE
EVALUATIONS
This committee was established by Article 15.55 of the 10th Collective Agreement and "charged with the task of reviewing the questions in Article 15 Appendix III (Course Evaluation Form). If the committee is unanimous, it shall make its recommendation for changing Article 15 Appendix III to the Parties within three months of the signing of the Agreement." As reported in the last AUFA meeting, "the Course Evaluation Committee was completed in the agreement that, since there was no unanimity on proposals for changes, there were no recommendations for changing Article 15 Appendix III."
As AUFA representatives, Eileen Hogan and I adhered to the following position developed by the AUFA Executive during negotiations.
Therefore the section of the evaluation form
that starts "This course evaluation is being conducted…" needs to be
edited. The second sentence starting "The purpose of the evaluation
…" should be deleted. The two questions cannot be used to enhance teaching
development.
As Administration members of the Committee, Andrew Mitchell and Greg MacKinnon argued that it was not within the mandate of this committee to consider any language changes on the Course Evaluation Form (Article 15 Appendix III) other than the questions. Our counter-proposal to delete the existing questions was turned down.
In fact, the preface to the existing Course Evaluation Form used by the Administration does not appear in Article 15 Appendix III. There should be no prefatory comment which is not agreed to by both parties, an issue that must be addressed by AUFA.
The Administration brought to the table two documents for consideration: one, the extensive course evaluation form used throughout the Faculty of Science (developed and introduced by M. Leiter); the other, an article (originally published in 1979) on ‘Student Ratings of Faculty’. The Administration hoped to add more questions to the form, and used arguments of persuasion (it’s in our own interest to provide a more comprehensive form) and fear (our chances for promotion might be reduced to a quantitative criterion based on the two existing questions). Neither argument was convincing, and they had to agree (a point emphasised by their own literature) that student evaluations were arbitrary and subjective, valid only for self-evaluation, not a basis for objective assessment, and by no means a fair basis by which promotions should be decided.
As came out in the AUFA meeting, Article 15 Appendix III is not meant to gather information on which decisions of promotion depend; it is useful to the Administration in other ways, chiefly to track the popularity (rather than actual merit) of courses and instructors. Nor, as suggested by the Administration team, can the existing information provided by the course evaluation forms be used to manipulate the decisions of the DRC and URC. Those decisions are to be based on the dossier as compiled by the applicant.
AUFA should act to clarify the proper use of Article 15 Appendix III, and have that use clearly identified in a prefatory comment to it, which will also state that this information is to be neither gathered nor used for any purpose other than that expressly stated.
I also believe that it is in our own best interest to develop a fairly uniform, quantifiable course evaluation form for use in the Faculty of Arts (and another for Professional Studies), principally for self-evaluation carried out through the annual career meetings. This information can be ours to include in, or exclude from, our dossier. The development of such a form (that can be done on-line as well, by those who wish to do so) should be undertaken by AUFA immediately.
Vernon Provencal
Chairperson
Course Evaluation (Parity) Committee