DSG announces changes to Trinity course evaluation system, including increased incentives

Have you completed your course evaluations yet? You may have noticed some changes.

Four updates to the Trinity course evaluation system were announced in a Thursday email from seniors Shrey Majmudar, chief of staff for Duke Student Government, and Meghna Mahadevan, vice president for academic affairs. This includes using a third-party evaluation system, condensing the evaluation form, automatically showing evaluations to students and increasing incentives to complete evaluations.

“As most of our student body knows, the course evaluation process has long had many areas of improvement; these include: a hard to find, clunky user interface; an out-of-date evaluation form; sparse accessibility of past evaluations to inform course registration, which results in an over-reliance on Rate My Professor; and a lack of incentives for students to complete evaluations,” the email reads.

Course evaluations are now hosted on Watermark, which is used by peer institutions according to the email. Some courses piloted Watermark in spring 2021.

“We are confident that this system will be way more user-friendly, both to fill out and view past evaluations,” the email reads. “Rather than many layers into DukeHub, evaluations may now be accessed via the emails you’ve received from the Assessment Office, the Course Evaluations tab in DukeHub’s navigation bar or the Watermark site.”

The evaluation form has also been condensed, and departments have the option to add their own questions at the end of the form.

While in previous years, instructors had to “opt in” to release course evaluations, the new system will require instructors to “opt out” instead, similar to Pratt course evaluations.

Incentives include allowing students to receive their final grades on DukeHub three days in advance and allowing students to view evaluations from previous semesters during registration if they complete one or more evaluations.

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