Educational Policies & Faculty/Student Relations

Interact with the NYU Center for Teaching Excellence to enhance the effectiveness of teaching at NYU; develop recommendations to support and enhance faculty-student relations, both in and out of the classroom.

Chair: Scott Illingworth
Members: Spiros Frangos, John Gershman, Fidelindo Lim, Noelle Molé Liston

 

Committee Reports

 

Agenda Items

Recommendations regarding Student Evaluations

This report has been written to begin a conversation about the revision and use of student evaluations of teaching (SETs) at NYU. The Continuing Faculty Senators Council (C-FSC) seeks to ensure that SETs are used primarily in the interests of identifying and cultivating good teaching. We are especially concerned with this issue given that a number of studies have raised concerns about various kinds of bias within teaching evaluations. Moreover, within the scholarship on SETs, there is an ongoing debate about problems with global measures of teaching (where global measures refer to general questions about an instructor or a class). Given that evaluations are regularly used in the assessment of continuing faculty, these issues are of special concern to our constituents.

We propose four sets of recommendations, two of which request collaboration with the Provost’s office and two of which make more general recommendations. The recommendations addressed to the Provost’s office focus on the revision and assessment of NYU SETs. Our other recommendations address issues related to the use of SETs for assessment.

Recommendations (November 13, 2018)