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[green]

So the student evaluations for one of my classes (and a new one for me at that) were never turned in.  They are missing.  Gone are the data points and written student feedback that would have been helpful for my tenure package and also in re-tooling the class for the future.

The kicker is that the student who volunteered to hand in the evaluations is a student with whom, since that time, I have had major honesty problems.  I have asked this student to recheck hu's stuff to see if the evaluations are lurking somewhere, but I am not hopeful.

Has this (the missing evaluations) happened to anyone else?  How have you handled it?  These are very prized in my SLAC, and I am feeling a little blue about their absence.

[kedves]

It has never happened to me, so I hadn't thought about it, but I thank you for bringing it up.  My department has been debating the pros and cons of online evaluations, the method we use now, and this possibility is an entry in the "con" column. 

I'm sorry it happened to you.  It doesn't sound as if there is anything you can do.  Do you have a procedure for faculty observation in your department?  If it's an option, even if everyone doesn't do it, I would suggest getting one of those this semester to have something for your file.  This semester, you can do your own questionnaire mid-term and/or at semester end.  That probably won't substitute for the official one in your records, but it would be helpful if you want student feedback.

[pgher]

I had it happen to me for last spring semester, which was my first semester at this institution.  Here, evaluations must be collected by non-students and non-instructors, so I enlisted a secretary.  When I heard that the evaluations were missing, I was first angry at the secretary, then angry at the system.  I had a long conversation with the chair of the relevant committee, and we agreed that there were significant flaws in the way the forms are handled.  I went through the various stages of grief, ending with "acceptance."

Subsequently, we discovered that approximately 80% of our department also had missing evaluations.  Our dept. chair investigated, and found almost all of them in storage.  Apparently there was some problem in the way the machines were coded or something.  In the end, I got my evaluations.

I guess there are a few lessons:
1.  Don't be too quick to lay blame.  There is a fairly long chain of events that has to happen to get evaluations from the individual students to the instructor.
2.  Student evaluation processes should be periodically reviewed and revised to minimize opportunities for errors.  This is particularly important in the present age of accountability.
3.  Be careful who you trust.
4.  Get other feedback.  Peer evaluations, informal student evaluations, etc.  These are only moderately useful (at best) for P&T, but are certainly useful for other purposes.

On the issue of online evals: This incident put me in the "anti" camp.  Suppose this administrative error had occurred with an online system.  With no paper trail, the information would be absolutely gone.  With paper evals, they can be re-scanned (at least in principle, and this time in practice).