Reflections on student opinions before and after the final exam - The variability of questionnaires.

Paper in proceeding, 2011

Student course evaluations are important tools for direct evaluation of student appreciation of courses. At Chalmers they are traditionally executed in terms of mid meeting with students and teachers followed by a written student questionnaire and the follow up meeting with students, student centre representatives and teachers where recommendations for future development can/will be suggested. The written questionnaire is considered as the hard and true facts about the perception of the course quality from a student point of view. The year 2010 we tried to take a footprint on the questionnaire responses before the examination and compare that with the responses after the examination. Preliminary results indicate that the response for the course questionnaire show significant differences indicating that the examination for somewhat reason has changed the perception of the teacher’s pedagogic ability and general perception of the course. This paper will show the interesting results on this but also show how to use repeated questions to check if the student opinion also changes during the filling of the questionnaire. Chalmers has in many ways a very good way of evaluating courses and programs but here will suggestions for further improvement and quality assurance of the courses be suggested. The aim of this paper is not to provide solutions but to discuss problems and opportunities with written questionnaires as one important source for quality assurance of courses.