Factors in the Evaluation of Instructors by Students

The evaluation of instructors by students through some sort of anonymous questionnaire is a procedure that has become established at many Universities. This produces numerical data that are used to classify the relative teaching effectiveness of instructors. Such instructor ratings have been collected over a four year period in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo, Canada. These data were analyzed statistically to investigate the possible effects of factors other than classroom performance; such as, teaching a subject for the first time, teaching service courses in other departments, subject matter, level of research support, admission year of the class, and class size. The majority of instructors were indistinquishable, although a few others were consistently different from this majority. Some observations are made, from this experience, regarding the significance of questionnaire ratings, their use in the University system, and the improvement of the quality of teaching.