By By Rob Tokanel, News Staff

‘ Nearing the end of its first school year in operation, the Teacher Rating and Course Evaluation (TRACE) Program may soon undergo changes to increase the quality of feedback and level of participation from students.
The TRACE Program, which allows students to rate the quality of their professors and courses through the myNEU portal after finals and leave feedback that can be viewed publicly through the site, replaced the paper rating survey last year.
Brendan Bannister, a faculty member in the College of Business Administration who is chairing a subcommittee of faculty, students and representatives for Information Services and the Provost’s Office charged with looking at possible improvements to the system, said the group, which has been meeting since the fall, would submit its final recommendations Wednesday to the Faculty Senate.
‘I think in the past seven months, we’ve found a lot of places where we’re going to come across with improvements that will make [TRACE] better for both students and faculty,’ he said.
Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching & Learning Kostia Bergman said the system has been a success in its first year, especially because it makes the suggestions from students easier for teachers to process and put to use.
‘If [professors] were lucky, sometimes in the middle or the end of the semesters they would get scribbles,’ he said. ‘It was hard to use that to improve teaching. Now people get printed comments, which drives it home more. People might think, ‘there must be something I’m doing wrong.”
However, he and Bannister both said the open-ended comment sections had been a source of complaint for some staff and could be put to better use. Bannister said the content of the reviews could occasionally be inappropriate for public forums about faculty members, but did not say what the proposed changes to the system would be.
‘There is a shared belief that feedback can have incredible value if done right, so what we are trying to do is come up with an agreed upon set of recommendations that will make feedback productive and available to students while making sure that there are adequate protections for faculty,’ Bannister said.
Bergman said participation should be another major area of focus. Since the surveys stopped being submitted in classrooms, the number of students providing feedback has dropped dramatically, a problem to which a solution has yet to be found.
Bergman said he thinks failure on the part of a student to participate probably implies they were satisfied enough with class that they didn’t feel it needed to change very much.
‘In some cases [the drop in participation] has been dramatic, and in some cases it’s gone from 80 or 90 percent to 60 percent,’ he said. ‘My attitude is that if people care they’re going to participate, and if people don’t care, that’s kind of a pass that says [the class was] good enough.’
Bannister said other areas that might be subject to change include the administration of the survey for non-traditional courses, like those that last only seven weeks or have shared faculty members.
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