“Another end of semester form to fill out about my professor (sigh) – why do I have to do these?”

YOUR FEEDBACK COUNTS – just as professors giving you feedback on your work to help you learn more effectively, this is your chance to give your professors useful feedback to help them teach more effectively.

You have the opportunity to fill out your course instructor surveys at the end of each course. The results of these help your professors to know what was working for you and what wasn’t. Think back over the whole semester before you rate your professor and carefully consider how much you have learned.

Think about the kind of feedback that will be helpful.

Especially important as feedback for your professors are the written comments. These should be useful so your professor can create the best learning environment for you and your fellow students.

Three things to remember: 

  • Give feedback that avoids “emotionally charged” words
  • Give feedback that describes specific behavior rather than your inferences
  • Give feedback that reflects on positive behaviors and gives solutions

Less helpful comments

Helpful comments

This professor was awesome.

This professor gave us lots of activities to do in the classroom which helped me REALLY understand what I was doing rather than remembering stuff for a quiz.

This professor sucks.

I had a problem understanding all the jargon in many of the lectures. It would have helped me if you talked in plainer English.

This professor doesn’t like students.

I wish you had talked to the class like you were teaching people and not just the content of his subject. I would have liked you to check for understanding at certain points in the lecture.

The professor just talked at us in the lecture.

I would have preferred if we could have done some group work to discuss some of the ideas with our peers

This professor was motivating.

This professor told us stories about how he collected data for his research and made me enthusiastic to want to do the same.

The professor never went over the homework.

It would have been helpful if the professor incorporated a few of the homework problems into the lecture so we could have seen how to go about solving them and could ask questions if we still didn’t understand.

The professor was caring.

I really appreciated the way the professor was always there after class to answer questions and always responded to my e-­‐mails.

*originally published by Faculty Innovation Center at University of Texas at Austin