Teaching Evaluation in the Department

Before you can improve, you need to know how you’re doing. That’s why the Department has been evaluating all of its courses since the fall semester 1998/1999. In each course, students are given the chance to speak up and share their experiences and opinions with us. Using a standardized questionnaire, we collect general information such as degree program, subject-specific semester, frequency of course attendance, and level of prior knowledge, and inquire whether:

• the course is well designed,
• it is easy to understand the teacher,
• the reading lists are useful,
• the workload is manageable,
• the exercise course is compatible with the respective lecture,
• the speed and level of difficulty of the course are appropriate,
• the mathematical notation and content are well explained,
• the teacher is well prepared,
• the teacher appears interested in the students’ success,
• the time required to prepare for, and follow-up after, the course is appropriate.

At the end of the questionnaire, the students give the course a grade, and estimate how well they will perform on the final examination.

In the fall 2018, the Department replaced the paper questionnaire with an electronic evaluation system based on the software EvaSys. Once feedback on all of the Department’s courses has been analyzed, the results are summarized by course type (lecture, lecture/exercise course, exercise course, seminar). These results influence how courses are taught in the following semesters.