Procedure for Assessing the Quality of University Courses: Can a Single Value Give Qualitative Information?

The assessment of a university course quality is a necessary feedback in order to improve subsequent courses. This evaluation usually is conducted through long surveys that many students could drop out it. So, the instructor will not know which areas to improve due to a small sample or inconsistent responses these long instruments may have. This course assessment also employed a short questionnaire that does not provide enough information to make course adjustments. Therefore, a short but informative survey for the instructor would be a valuable tool in-course assessment. In this scenario, this study aims to show a novel procedure to find a relationship between the quantitative score of a course with its qualitative information. So, an approximate result of the qualitative results could get by asking the students a single value. For this, seven groups of Civil Engineering students participated in this study. Students answered two surveys: qualitative and quantitative. The first one evaluated five criteria: responsibility, knowledge, pedagogy, didactics, and evaluation of the same subject. The second one had a single question: from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest value, and 10 is the highest value, how many points could you score the whole course? As a result, this study shows a statistical procedure to turn the second instrument into a single value. Although the procedure was calibrated with a qualitative survey, it can be used in different surveys, either with different criteria, numbers of criteria, or questions. Therefore, in future research, this method can be validated in other engineering courses or other areas of knowledge.