Thank you for your forbearance as our dean’s office team has worked with the provost’s office to address the issues with your course evaluations for 2024. This page provides context on the cause of the issues and specific instructions on how to complete your 2024 annual reports in light of that situation.
Problems with 2024 Course Evaluations
While Spring 2024 evaluations were processed correctly, as you know some of the Summer and Fall 2024 course evaluations were not. Additionally, 25% of our courses in CHS did not have course evaluations processed at all in Fall 2024 due to a new threshold for the reporting of evaluations. In order to protect student identities, the provost’s office applied a threshold of a minimum of five responses in a course. Thus evaluations for any course with a response rate of fewer than five students, regardless of the number of students enrolled, were not reported.
Additionally, cross-listed courses were evaluated based on the individual course sections and not the combination of the cross-listed sections; that change increased the number of courses that did not meet the threshold.
Finally, for Summer and Fall 2024, the overall means for the four categories (Course structure & management, Support for students, Learning, Overall mean) were no longer calculated by the course evaluation vendor due to a data volume issue.
Through the discussions with the provost’s office over the last few weeks, we have learned that, unfortunately, most of these issues with the evaluations cannot be retroactively fixed.
Annual Report of Faculty Work | New Deadline
Because of these challenges with the course evaluations, the new deadline to file your faculty annual reports via our Smartsheet is now February 19, two weeks from today.
Fall 2024 course evaluations | Calculating your averages
For all Fall 2024 courses that had an evaluation report released to you, you will need to calculate the overall means for the four reporting categories in the course evaluation table on our annual report form (Course structure & management, Support for students, Learning, Overall mean).
Our CHS team has created a spreadsheet for you that will easily calculate these overall category means when you insert the reported means that you did receive for each question into corresponding cells. Here are the steps for accessing that tool:
In the second paragraph of our Smartsheet, you will find a link that reads “Use this spreadsheet to calculate the means for your course evaluations (link will force a copy).” When you click that link, you will be taken to a Google sheet. Click “Make a copy” in the blue box to confirm you want to make the copy. This action will take you to your own copy in which you can enter your evaluation information. Use the light yellow cells for each course and category. The green cells will display the calculated mean.
CHS does not require faculty to report course evaluations for summer courses. If you would like to include your summer courses in the evaluation table, you can apply the same guidance above as for the fall courses.
Fall 2024 course evaluations | No course evaluation process
If course evaluations were not processed for any of your Fall 2024 courses, please list the course and section numbers in the course evaluation table of your annual report form and add this note: “The evaluation for this course was not processed due to not meeting the minimum student response threshold.”
Editing an already submitted annual report
If you have already filed your annual report, you can edit your previous submission to add these course averages. To make these changes to your annual report submission, go to https://app.smartsheet.com/
After you log in to Smartsheet, you should be able to see the information you submitted for your annual report (this information is viewable to you only). If you click on your submission, a details panel will appear on the right. Use that panel to review and modify the information submitted in your annual report, including uploading missing attachments or re-attaching the documents as PDFs. Please make sure all documents submitted are PDFs.
If you encounter any issues with the editing, please contact Kelsey Cappiello at cappiellokn@vcu.edu.
Please be assured that our dean’s office team is continuing to work with the provost’s office to address these issues and prevent similar problems from occurring with the evaluations in Spring, Summer and Fall 2025.
Thank you very much for your understanding and patience.