Academy and Studying in Germany

Professors mark students: that is normal. But for a few years now students have also been evaluating their teachers. This is called „teaching evaluation”. Different universities treat the results very differently.

For the time being they are still rare birds. Not more than sixty students have registered for the major in Evaluation. „It’s a job description that still has to be developed”, says Heike Steckhan of the Bonn Centre for Evaluation and Methods (Zentrum für Evaluation und Methoden / ZEM). Since April 2008, the ZEM together with the University of Bonn has been training professional evaluators who are expected to work later in the educational sector: for instance, in the evaluation of seminars and lectures. Somewhat older is the major in Evaluation offered by three co-operating universities in the Saarland. The evaluator scene is not much bigger than that: „In the German-speaking world”, says Steckhan, „the only other instance is the advanced training offered at the University of Bern in Switzerland”.

Evaluation required by law

Yet the demand for evaluators in Germany is great. The evaluation of teaching at universities and polytechnics is required by law. All institutions of higher education are obliged to canvass their students’ opinion about how good the teaching really is. How the survey is to be carried out, however, is not stipulated; each institution can decide that for itself. Sometimes students are asked to fill in a paper questionnaire, sometimes to answer the questions online.

The University of Greifswald plumped early for modern methods of communication in the evaluation of its teaching staff. Although mobile telephones are otherwise strictly banned in the lecture hall, sixty medical students were equipped with special mobile phones and repeatedly asked by their professors to send an SMS to a certain number. Previously, the evaluation had been done with pencil and paper. „In the long run”, explains Bernd Kordaß, Dean of Students in Dentistry, „that proved too cumbrous and time-consuming”.

Feedback on the same evening

Was the subject matter comprehensibly communicated? Was the pace all right? Was there the possibility of active participation? A short message suffices - „and the teacher can see on the same evening how his lecture went down”, says Kordaß in praise of the system. In the meantime the mobile phones have in turn been superseded. Now Greifswald medical students evaluate their professors in online questionnaires. Because every student evaluates every individual course that he takes every semester, a good deal of data is collected: according to Kordaß, „about 2,000 individual votings per semester”. From this, the University complies a ranking of the most successful lectures. Student representatives then reward the best teacher with a certificate.

The tops and flops of teachers

The Polytechnic of Medium-Sized Enterprises (Fachhochschule des Mittelstands / FHM) in Bielefeld is also banking on the publication of its evaluation results. As it is a private university, bad marks for professors could, at worst, lead to a sacking. Here too students make their evaluations online. „From these, we can then compile lists of tops and flops”, says Stefan Bieletzke, Professor and Evaluation Representative at the FHM. Thanks to special software, the names of teachers who have scored well can be shown in green lettering and those who have scored badly in red: the colour-coded warning signal can hardly be overlooked.

„The data have to be registered by the professors so that, if need be, things can be changed”, emphasises Bieletzke. If a teacher continually receives red marks, a talk with him is called for. Soon professors too will be asked to evaluate individual majors at the Polytechnic.

Students take an active part

At other institutions of higher learning the trend to evaluation has received much less emphasis. „At many places the change of consciousness is still going on”, is how Heike Steckhan of the ZEM describes the situation. „At many universities endless amounts of data are being collected, but there’s still quite a hitch in the implementation.” Yet systematic feedback is altogether in the universities’ interest: if there are problems, they can be recognised more swiftly through the evaluation process.

Many students are also dissatisfied with the universities’ treatment of evaluations up to now. In 2005, therefore, five students at the Technical University of Berlin had the idea of organising their own teacher evaluations in the Internet. At their web site, Meinprof.de (i.e., My Prof.de), German students can now evaluate their teachers. To date, feedback from more than 310,000 students has been entered – above all from schools that have hitherto been rather hesitant in their treatment of evaluation results.

„Hardly any of our students are active at Meinprof.de”, says Stefan Bieletzke of the FHM Bielefeld. „They can enter their evaluations much more effectively directly at our site.”