If you’re a UVic student, there’s a good chance you’ve been asked to fill out a Course Experience Survey, or CES. If this is your first semester at UVic, you can expect to hear about these surveys soon. You’ll likely be asked to fill them out in class and, if you’re like me, you’ll probably forget to do so until the night they’re due (if you fill them out at all).
You might be wondering, as I have been, what exactly is the purpose of these surveys? What happens with your answers? Is it worth filling them out at all?
I looked into it, so you don’t have to!
What is a Course Experience Survey?
In short, it’s a survey in which you give feedback on your instructors and the courses you’ve taken. Links to these surveys are sent out near the end of every semester via email. These surveys can be taken from the time you receive your link to 11:59 pm on the last day of classes, but your prof should be giving you time in class to complete them. You can also access them here: https://ces.uvic.ca/blue/.
Will my answers be anonymous?
If you’re concerned about anonymity, don’t worry, you’ve got it. Not only are your answers anonymous, but your instructor won’t be able to access reports until they’ve submitted all grades for that class, so even if they know who said what, they can’t retaliate against or reward that person.
Who gets to read my answers?
Course Experience Surveys include two kinds of data: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative data is made up of your answers to questions on a scale. Qualitative data are your written comments, where you can give detailed critical feedback that goes beyond the scale questions of “effective” and “not effective.” Surveys for every class are combined into reports made up of data from all surveys filled out.
Quantitative data is available to both instructors and the department’s dean/chair/director. Your qualitative comments are only shared with the faculty member being assessed. Your prof’s higher-ups will only see those comments if that prof chooses to share them; however, this is not the case for sessional or continuing sessional instructors. Their full CES results are available to their superiors.
Ultimately, your individual survey is not shared with anyone. Only the overall results and comments combined into reports that give a broad view of how successfully a course was run are shared. What your prof will see is a report that looks something like this.
What are survey answers used for?
The chair manual for using these surveys, “Using the New Course Experience Survey to Assess and Improve Teaching at UVic,” states that:
“For the instructor it provides direct responses from students that can serve as the basis for ongoing reflection, modification, and experimentation… For the department, it provides a basis for examining student responses to teaching across courses, instructors, and years, both currently and longitudinally. At the institutional level, it provides norms and baselines that allow for a critical examination of teaching across faculties over time and helps to answer questions about teaching and learning at UVic and with respect to the national context.”
It’s a mouthful, but essentially these survey results can be used in a variety of ways. This manual goes on to elaborate that course evaluations are more of a tool for learning and growth than accountability. Profs often don’t share comments because they worry the negative answers will overshadow the positive. If a prof does share their survey comments, it will likely be in their teaching dossiers; a document to assist with the evaluation for purposes of promotions and tenure.
Okay, but why are these surveys important for me?
Student life is busy, you pay a lot for your classes, and filling out a survey is probably the last thing on your mind during exam season. You’re probably not sure if it’s even worth filling these forms out, but filling them out is really a selfless task. Unless you’ll be taking more courses from a prof, your answers will (hopefully) help that prof improve their teaching style for future students.
If you had a particularly positive or negative experience in a course, your feedback is really important for a prof to see. Positive feedback is just as productive as constructive criticism. It tells your instructors what was working. Likewise, if you had a bad experience and you’re good at respectfully phrasing your complaints, your prof might appreciate being told what went wrong so that they can prevent it in the future.
Ultimately, it’s for you to decide if filling out Course Experience Surveys is a good use of your time. I like using them to give kudos to my favourite profs, but the tight deadline to fill them out can fly by without me noticing.
I have a serious issue that I don’t think can be addressed through Course Experience Surveys. What do I do?
Sometimes leaving comments to a prof is productive, but that’s only the case when they’re open to criticism. If you’ve been having conflict with an instructor and feel like you’ve been treated unfairly, it may be worth speaking to UVic’s ombudsperson to see what steps you can take to have your voice heard.
To learn more about UVic’s Course Experience Survey, check out their student FAQ.
To see faculty reports from 2015 to the present, check out this page.