Over the last two generations, student course evaluation has been a staple of American higher education. It serves at least two purposes: it gives superiors a method to assess each instructor's quality, and it gives the instructor a chance to improve based on student's input. A third incentive is to allow students to have a say in how they are taught. The evaluation is almost always done once per term and at the end of each course. It would be far better for both the instructor and the students if the feedback arrived at a time when instruction could be altered within the current term.

After each class it would be wonderful to collect feedback. Until recently, the cost of doing so was prohibitive, making daily feedback impossible. However, thanks to Google Forms, anyone can now develop and run surveys for free and with little effort. 

Student course evaluation is a stressful process for many professors. Students evaluations are frequently used as the primary method of assessing teaching. They can influence performance evaluations, tenure and promotion. They are summative in nature, meaning they measure what has happened at the end of a course.

There is no way to adapt until the course is given again, and even then, the group of students is completely different. It would be far preferable if teachers could receive comments during the course rather than at the end. Because the objective of this type of feedback is to “shape” the instructor's approach to teaching the rest of the course, it's termed formative feedback.

Course evaluation has always been done with pencil and op-scan forms. These evaluations have been shifting online for the last ten years or so. When used in the traditional manner at the end of a course, evaluations are largely summative, however instructors may be able to gain some insight into the following offering of the same course by reading the students' written comments.

It's fortunate that course assessments are so rare and rigid. “ Feedback supplied once a year via standardized district, state, national, or international assessments is far too rare and narrowly focused to be effective.” The same might be stated of existing course evaluation methods.

There have been a few attempts to use mid-term evaluations to formatively use evaluations. On an instructor's request, the Teaching and Learning Centre will provide a mid-semester evaluation form to the students, and the meet with the instructor to discuss the results.