Calvin, Ogulcan, Rosa
There are many surveys about student experience at any educational institution. However, most of these surveys are very broad and don’t focus on empowering students to express themselves fully. Most of the time students don’t give the most candid answers and often times they can be quite biased. Our survey aims to identify what aspects of faculty matters the most to students at City Tech and aspects of faculty the school lacks. From the responses, we hope to gain a bigger picture on what students are satisfied with in terms of faculty and what the faculty needs to further improve on.
There were numerous revisions that we went through in order to achieve the correct focus for our survey. In the beginning, our intention was to create a survey purely to evaluate the effectiveness of professors similar to how ratemyprofessor, ratemyteachers or operates. However, the problem that existed was that the feedback and ratings that students give to professors are too, subjective, too general, and the data that we were to receive would not be accurate and would not really want to measure what we intended it to.
Our second revision was focused on student satisfaction on different aspects of the school such as education, faculty and services. However, the problem that we encountered was that there were too many variables to take into account. Therefore, it made the survey too lengthy for students and it was too similar to already existing surveys such as CUNY AIR and the NSSE. We did not want to create an inferior survey that would measure close to the same thing. Another obstacle we encountered with it was that we always asked ourselves what was the purpose? This made it really difficult to proceed with this revision.
Going back to the drawing board for a new direction with our project, we researched on teacher evaluation surveys, what they measure, what they intend to measure, and why they aren’t as effective as they can be, and potential solutions to these problems. What we wanted to do was to create a new version of the City Tech teacher evaluation survey but because of political reasons, were not able to fully pursue it and have it be the main focus of our project.
What we have now is a survey with open ended questions with flexible answers that asks questions that pertain to faculty. How this differs from the original ideas we had is that the questions are much more meaningful, and they are much more specific. What we hope to achieve from the data is to find out what are the more important elements in City Tech for students, aspects in faculty that the school needs and can improve on, and find a trend in the overall satisfaction of faculty.
Moving on to the rationale, we want to know the relationship between students and faculty. Does faculty really have respect for students? Do they affect how you get your education at City Tech? Are faculty there to help you when you need it the most? Each one of our questions will specifically target the faculty and how to improve on it.
The first question asks about which factor matters the most to students about faculty. This question is important to us as it will help us understand what aspects impact students the most when evaluating a faculty member.
The second question is a scale question and it asks how seriously students take the student teacher evaluations forms at the end of the semester. Most of the time we have seen students give high ratings to professors when they did not deserve it. We want to know if students take it seriously or not and if they put time into it.
The third question asks the students how does the faculty affect the courses you register at City Tech? This is a huge question because faculty plays a huge role in students academic careers. Students want the right professor for their classes. There are professors who have full respect to students and some have none. Our survey will basically identify the elements behind it.
The fourth question in our survey ask about what difficulties students have encountered so far with faculty at City Tech? This question is important to our survey because it will help reveal some of the problems that students that have encountered that might undermine their experience with faculty at City Tech. This will also show us what faculty needs to work on.
Our fifth question asks about some of the problems that students might have encountered when they try to talk with the department chair. Because the chair is the head of the department, she has control of courses, programs and oversees the faculty. Therefore, students need to be able to communicate with her if they have any issues.
The six question we ask student what they want to see improved about the faculty in terms of teaching. This question will help us reveal what are some of the practices that faculty can develop more on to help better convey the material to students.
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Our seventh question asks what would you like faculty do to keep students more interested/engaged in lectures and classes. This question will reveal some of the things students want to happen in class in order to retain a student’s interest. This will help students want to learn more and also help them learn more.
Our eight question asks about the quality of academic advisement. There are many times where students come for advisement and end up leaving without proper guidance. Many times the faculty doesn’t advise properly and just agree on whatever the student may ask but that doesn’t work since the student is the one with the problems. We want to know if students are getting properly advised and this is why we are asking this question. This question will help us to create a virtual representation and get a comprehensive idea of how students feel about the faculty in general.
The ninth question will be a question that asks on a scale how satisfied are they overall with the faculty. This will be a support question for our main topic. It will be a backup to our previously asked questions.
