UNI students will not be evaluating their professors through the customary student assessments in spring 2020, due to the changes brought by COVID-19.

The elimination of student assessments was announced by Provost Jim Wohlpart in an email to faculty on Monday, March 30, along with other updates on the decisions made by the UNI Incident Command System team, Faculty Senate and Leadership and members of the Provost’s office. 

“Along with the quick pivot to online learning, we have also shifted a great deal of our policies and practices,” wrote Wohlpart. 

Those shifts included an extension of the “credit/no credit” and course withdrawal deadlines, the option for tenure-track professors to stop the tenure clock for one year and postponement of other faculty reviews and department head evaluations, in addition to the elimination of student assessments.

Traditionally, students use an online assessment instrument towards the end of each semester to provide feedback on their professor’s teaching of the course material. However, Associate Provost John Vallentine, Operations Section Chief of the Incident Command System, said that in light of the COVID-19 situation, proceeding with evaluations as normal meant “students would have been inundated with emails” that would “take up valuable student time.” He also said that the sudden switch to online classes made it difficult to create an equitable assessment instrument.

“Students would have been assessing their faculty members’ instruction during the pre-spring break period and the virtual instruction after [s]pring break on the same assessment instrument,” he wrote in an email. “With the current assessment instrument, it would have been impossible to separate the two time periods and address the different types of teaching that have occurred; thus, different and perhaps confounding results may have occurred.”

Barbara Cutter, associate professor of history and Faculty Chair, seconded Vallentine’s point. 

“Even if you have taught online a lot, if you try to change an in-person class to an online class in the middle of a semester, you can’t do it easily,” she said. “There’s going to be things that don’t all go well, and faculty really have no control over it because they had to do this in a rush.”

She added that the uncertain environment provoked by COVID-19 has created an already-stressful educational climate for both students and professors.

“Everything else that’s going on around our lives can be really stressful and upsetting, [so] it’s hard to know if a faculty member is being evaluated on their class or on everything that’s going on because there’s just so much disruption at this moment,” she said.

Jim Mattingly, associate professor of management and Chair of the Faculty Senate, also noted that eliminating student evaluations gives teachers more freedom to implement innovative procedures in the new online environment. 

“These student evaluations actually do carry perhaps a lot more weight than students recognize, [and] because everyone is risk-averse, they can have a dampening effect on innovation and risk-taking in the classroom,” he said. “That’s one of the most important reasons that we didn’t want to have faculty evaluations this semester. We didn’t want instructors to play it safe; we wanted them to do what was best for their students not thinking about what the implications for their evaluations might be.”

Becky Wilson Hawbaker, President of United Faculty, noted that faculty shared varying viewpoints on the issue.

“We did hear from some faculty who wanted the evaluations, who were curious to compare this [online] form of teaching versus how they normally teach,” she said. “So we had originally said, ‘Let’s make it optional,’ but […] that’s more work involved for the people who have to schedule, program and release the evaluations, so it was easiest all the way around to just cancel them.”

However, administrative and faculty leaders emphasized that the elimination of student evaluations doesn’t mean students have no options to provide feedback on faculty performance. Mattingly said that professors have the option to create course-specific surveys through eLearning, and Vallentine advised students with concerns about specific faculty members or courses to contact the department head by email or phone. 

Hawbaker also urged students to report positive faculty efforts by contacting the department head or nominating the faculty member for various on-campus awards. This is important, she said, because of one of the other policy changes announced in Wohlpart’s email: merit pay will be spread equally across all faculty for spring 2020. 

“People who are going above and beyond in their teaching in this time will not qualify for merit pay,” she said, “[so] having students say thank you is probably the most authentic way to draw attention to that.”