SIDA manages the course evaluation system through Watermark Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES). We provide dashboards for department leaders to review the data, and publish reports of overall statistics and patterns of data.
Student feedback is vital to the success of the university and every student is expected and encouraged to provide feedback for all the courses they are enrolled in. The evaluation results are used by faculty to make changes to course content and delivery. University administrators use the evaluation results to make personnel decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Where should students go to complete their course evaluations?
- Who has access to evaluation results?
- How are evaluations for courses taught by several faculty treated?
- How does ACE ensure student response confidentiality?
- When and how long is the course evaluation period?
- Where can I find documentation on how to use the ACE system?
Where should students go to complete their course evaluations?
An email with a direct link to the course evaluation system is automatically sent to all enrolled students once the semester evaluation period begins. This email is sent to the students' UNO email address. Canvas notifications with direct links are also used to remind students to complete their course evaluations.
Email reminders are periodically sent to students who have not completed and submitted their course evaluations before the semester deadline. As a student, if you are still getting email reminders even after completing all your evaluations, please check that you not only completed but also submitted all evaluations.
Who has access to evaluation results?
Students can only see the course evaluations they have submitted. They do not have access to summary data collected for a specific course or faculty.
Through Canvas, faculty have access to their individual response rate monitors once the evaluation period begins. Faculty are not able to identify a student's evaluation response or whether a student has completed an evaluation or not. Evaluation summary results are available a week after final grades have been submitted. These results contain a summary of all student responses with no student identifying information. Email notifications are sent out to faculty once evaluation results are available for viewing.
Each unit chair, director, and dean has access to individual faculty evaluations as well as aggregated results.
How are evaluations for courses taught by several faculty treated?
Students can only fill out one evaluation form for a course. Courses with multiple instructors have one evaluation form broken into course specific questions and instructor specific questions which have the name of the instructor included so that students can identify which feedback portion belongs to a particular instructor.
How does ACE ensure student response confidentiality?
Student responses remain confidential and aggregated results are released to faculty after final grades for the term have been submitted. The aggregated results do not contain any identifying information. While faculty can track the overall response rate for a course, they cannot identify a particular student's response or tell whether a specific student submitted their course evaluation.
When and how long is the course evaluation period?
The length of the evaluation period is dependent upon the length of the course. Evaluations are distributed according to the schedule below (faculty cannot set custom evaluation dates).
- For courses with an 80+ days duration, the course evaluation period begins 21 days before the course end date and runs for 14 days. Email reminders are sent to students 7 and 12 days after the evaluation begin date.
- For courses with a 41-79 days duration, the course evaluation period begins 14 days before the course end date and runs for 13 days. Email reminders are sent to students 4 and 11 days after the evaluation begin date.
- For courses with a 15-40 days duration, the course evaluation period begins 7 days before the course end date and runs for 6 days. Email reminders are sent to students 4 days after the evaluation begin date.
- For courses with a less than 14 days duration, the course evaluation period begins 2 days before the course end date and runs for 2 days. No email reminders are sent to students.
Where can I find documentation on how to use the ACE system?