Council discusses teacher evaluations

By Jami Peterson

University Council members want tougher restrictions on the confidentiality of teacher evaluations.

Every five years, the UC Rules Committee looks over the student teacher evaluation procedures, allowing UC members to recommend changes. However, when the committee came back with a sweeping seal of approval this year, faculty disagreed.

The section four policy, which requires complete confidentiality of the evaluation results, often is violated and should be watched closely, UC members said.

Sociology Professor Eleanor Godfrey said, according to section four, student answer sheets and evaluations are not returned directly to the instructor involved.

Godfrey said the results sometimes are sent to the department offices where they are typed by secretaries, and the instructor is not allowed to remove them from the office.

“I like section four. I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “However, it’s violated all over this campus.”

Also, she said, tabulations of the scores are never sent to the teachers. “Nobody gets their answer sheets,” she said.

UC Executive Secretary J. Carroll Moody said faculty also disagreed over whether every section a professor teaches in the same course should be evaluated or only one.

Moody said some departments require all sections to be evaluated. However, some faculty said they think the decision of what should be evaluated should be theirs.

“There was a number of other questions about how it (student evaluation) was being administered and the interpretation of the provisions,” Moody said.