You’ve probably filled out a end-of-term course evaluation at some time in your student life. It’s the survey that asks you to rate your professor’s coherence, oral and visual presentation, helpfulness, and all that. After you fill it out, it disappears into a black hole, never to be seen again.

Most students don’t know that the results of this survey are published on Mathsoc. You can look at summaries of classes from previous terms. There is no search functionality, but the data is there.

In this article, I will analyze this dataset and answer common questions about professors and teaching quality. Who are the best and worst profs in UW Math? Do profs get lazy and stop caring about classes after they get tenure? Do classes generally get better in upper year? All of these questions can be answered with data science!

First look at the dataset

First, I downloaded all the PDF data files for the terms from Winter 2012 to Spring 2016 (14 terms total), and converted them to TXT. Then, I wrote a Python script to parse the TXT files and extract all the relevant numbers.

I looked at the following questions from the survey:

Evaluate the organization and coherence of the lectures (Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Poor) Evaluate the instructor’s treatment of students’ questions(Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Poor) Evaluate the effectiveness of the instructor’s visual presentation (Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Poor) Evaluate the effectiveness of the instructor’s oral presentation (Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Poor) Evaluate the overall effectiveness of the instructor as a teacher (Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Poor)

I then converted it to a 5-point system where 5 = Excellent, 4 = Good, 3 = Satisfactory, 2 = Unsatisfactory, 1 = Very Poor. Some questions had answer options of (Too much / Somewhat too much / Okay / Somewhat too little / Too little), and I ignored these since they don’t easily convert to a 5-point system.

The dataset contains some very small classes, so to reduce variance, I only looked at classes with at least 15 students.

Most courses are okay: the average response to the “overall effectiveness” question is somewhere between “Good” and “Excellent”, with only a small number of classes scoring “Satisfactory” or below.

Responses to “Evaluate the overall effectiveness of the instructor as a teacher”

The answers to the 5 questions (coherence, visual, oral, questions, overall) are highly correlated. Oral presentation is slightly more important than visual presentation for overall effectiveness.