Academic Senate discusses revising student and faculty evaluation forms, floats 3-year bachelor program idea

By Natasha Salganik, Contributing Writer

Towson University’s Academic Senate discussed at its October meeting plans to update both student and peer evaluation forms for professors, and touched on the possibility of creating a 3-year accelerated bachelor’s program. 

Professor Sonali Raje and Brianne Lauka, director of assessment, presented on potential revisions of student and peer evaluation forms on behalf of the Teaching Evaluation Task Force, which was created to guide improvements of teaching evaluation methods. Raje listed recent changes to the current student evaluation survey. 

“Now we have only 10 multiple choice questions and three open ended questions,” Raje said during her presentation to the senate. “We have definitely shortened the survey instrument to make sure that we are only focusing on questions that can be meaningful to faculty.”

The task force is part of a larger project to reevaluate and update student and faculty peer review mechanisms. Raje said the goal of editing the current review forms is to make sure the feedback can help faculty improve.

“Some priorities were reducing bias in student feedback in particular, to get away from scoring comparative overall score between faculty for using that as a metric for decision making, and to really focus on improving teaching,” Lauka said during her presentation to the senate. 

Professor Cheryl Brown said that for her, previous evaluation systems produced wide variations in feedback for similar classes. 

“It made me devalue the evaluation because of [the] contrast, and what I realize is that it’s not measuring accurately,” Brown said. “This [reevaluation] is going to help.” 

In the report the task force submitted to the Academic Senate, it ultimately did not recommend any “standard instrument” for the evaluation forms. It instead recommended that changes to the evaluation forms be left to Towson’s colleges and departments. 

During the meeting, Provost Melanie Perreault suggested that Towson should consider planning for a 3-year accelerated bachelor’s program, which would remove gen-ed requirements. Several other schools in Massachusetts and Utah have created similar programs.

Perreault said that a 3-year program might give Towson a competitive edge. 

“Whatever institution goes first is going to benefit most,” Perreault said while addressing the senate. “I think there will be universities, even in our own system, who will choose to get rid of gen-ed. This is how they are going to do it.”

Perreault conceptualized the program as removing gen-ed requirements for participants and running on 7-week course schedules. 

“Three 7-week classes at a time, no less no more,” Perreault said. “You run [those credits] through in three years, you have 180 credits.” 

Perreault said the program is only a concept, and that it’d need to be piloted carefully to a small number of students and majors.