All courses are evaluated online, and decisions about what courses are to be evaluated are generally made by the department chairperson and dean. Instructors and students will receive emails announcing when the survey is available. Students can access all of their evaluations directly from Agora, making access and completion simple and efficient. Only students enrolled after the deadline for course withdrawal will be able to complete the survey.

Viewing Online Course Evaluation Surveys
The survey consists of 14 standard-response questions and four open-ended questions chosen by faculty on the University Council on Teaching from the previous paper instrument. You may also add up to five customized questions. The online course evaluation survey instrument is available on this webpage.

Conducting course evaluations online has proven to be easy, generate better quality responses, preserve class time, and provide immediate reporting at the end of the semester.

Please note that there are many other advantages to using the online course evaluation:

• The system supports the evaluation of cross-listed and team-taught courses by providing an evaluation for each instructor, if they both wish to administer an online course evaluation.
• Faculty can download the results for analysis.
• The process is disaster resistant.
• The survey is administered and stored electronically at a secure site.

Viewing Survey Results
Faculty members will be notified by email when the results are available. The reports will be available through a link in your Agora Portal and can be printed or downloaded for further analysis. "How to View Your Online Course Evaluation Results" explains the steps necessary for accessing survey results in the Agora Portal. The results are archived, and prior semesters are available for reference.

Adding Customized Questions
Begin by logging into the Agora Portal, and then clicking on Course Evaluations. You can enter up to five customized questions. If you want to use some of the Traditional Variation questions, they are available for reference at www.bc.edu/courseevaluations. You can copy and paste these questions into the course evaluation screen. The answer key for all customized questions must be the agreement scale that follows: Strongly Agree, Agree, Uncertain, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and Not Applicable.

Student Services offers training for faculty members interested in learning more about adding customized questions.

Adding or Changing Survey Questions
The questions cannot be changed but up to five customized questions can be added. Instructors will be notified when the link to add questions is available through your Agora Portal.

Improving Response Rates
We continue to strive to improve response rates. Some system enhancements are listed below.

• The course evaluation survey period extends to the day after the last final exam.
• Students who complete all of their online course evaluations are given access to posted grades on the first day of final exams.
• Instructors will receive emails during the survey administration period reminding them to encourage students to complete the survey and asking them to inform students why it's important to do so.
• During the summer sessions, evaluations are administered twice: mid-June for courses finishing at the end of June and early August for the remainder of the summer courses.
• Institutional Research conducts surveys and focus groups with students and faculty to identify strengths and weaknesses of the online process.

TX Field
The 'tx' field is an indicator added into the course numbering scheme to help differentiate among multiple instructors in a course when classifying the evaluations. If a course has only one instructor, this indicator will always appear in the title as 'tx1'. If a course has more than one instructor, the first instructor would see 'tx1' in his/her view of the course number, while the second instructor would see 'tx2' in his/her view of the course number. This helps to ensure that the correct evaluation data is associated with and accessible only to the relevant instructor. The instructor name is also included in the course numbering as an added visual cue to students, so that if they are evaluating a team-taught course, they will direct their responses to each of the appropriate instructors.

For more information contact the Office of Student Services by calling 617-552-3300 or by sending an email to studentservices@bc.edu. Feel free to send any comments or suggestions about the course evaluation system or website to evals@bc.edu.