Student Evaluations of Teaching Response Rates During Challenging Times

Like other aspects of learning at UMaine in spring 2020, student evaluations of teaching (SET) for all courses were administered online using the existing Explorance Blue system. A total of 2250 course sections were evaluated online with 20,191 evaluations received from students. While these numbers are impressive, they do represent a decline in overall mean response rate from 50.4% in fall 2019 to 38.2% in the spring (although the fall percentage only includes the ~70% of courses since not all did online evaluations). Anecdotal information indicates that response rates were down across most of the University of Maine System (UMS) campuses. Previous research, at UMaine and other institutions, has suggested that giving students in-class time to complete their SETs yields higher response rates. We speculate that the absence of available in-class time, coupled with other challenging conditions that may have reduced the priority of SETs for students, led to the lower response rates this semester. Interestingly, web-based courses (i.e., ones that were originally planned to be online prior to Covid-19) had a steady response rate of 44% for fall and spring. 

Figure 1: Dashboard of response rate statistics for UMaine – spring 2020.

For further details on response rates by course level, course component and other breakdowns, please see the Spring 2020 Response Rate Updates for UMaine.