Assessing the Effects of a Reformed System of Student Evaluation of Teaching
Authors
-
Gergely Dániel Lukáts
Affiliation
Department of Stochastics, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Műegyetem rkp. 3., H-1111 Budapest, Hungary
-
Zombor Berezvai
AffiliationInstitute of Marketing, Corvinus University of Budapest, Fővám tér 8., H-1093 Budapest, Hungary
-
Roland Molontay
Affiliation
Department of Stochastics, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Műegyetem rkp. 3., H-1111 Budapest, Hungary
MTA-BME Stochastics Research Group, Műegyetem rkp. 3., H-1111 Budapest, Hungary
Department of Management and Business Economics, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Műegyetem rkp. 3., H-1111 Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
The importance of student evaluation of teaching (SET) in higher education has increased substantially in the past decades. Despite this increase, there is no consensus on the most efficient way of executing these surveys or about the questions. This study analyses the impact of an SET system reform on the distribution of the responses and the response rate. The reform impacted the questions, the scale used for evaluation, the anchor labels of the scale elements, and the incentives for students to fill out the survey. Our results show that the number of extreme responses increased after the reform, which can be due to the elimination of anchor labels of the middle scale points. Insufficient effort bias also increased; however, the new motivation system doubled the response rate, which helped to collect more representative sets of evaluations. Taking into consideration the relatively small increase in insufficient responses, we believe this incentive can be a valid choice for SET surveys.
