Did you know that the results of the official,
university sanctioned end-of-term feedback sessions are kept on record
in the GRC? I did an informal survey recently and not one person out of the dozen or so I asked knew this – not even the ones I was sure would should know about it.
Personally, I heard about them from a prof early in first term and have ended up consulting the results a few times during my time here, usually right around the time I'm picking classes. So obviously they're not secret – it's just that no one promotes them as a good source of information about the courses and professors here.
Student Council is in the midst of revamping the mid-term evaluation process so that inspired me to go and look at them today. I was surprised to see that not only were the results of
our winter classes on file but so were our summer ones (for some reason, I thought
they held back the release of the results for six months but I guess
once the marks are submitted, the feedback summaries are distributed.)
Although the
written feedback you give as part of the official process isn't available, the marks you give to each professor in all ten or so
categories on the scale of 1-7 are compiled and given averages. Plus the ranks for all ten categories are given an overall average at the bottom of the summary sheet so you can get a pretty accurate
sense of how the whole class felt about a course.
Because they're
available in the GRC to any student who asks (and because they won't
mean anything to any non-FIMS person who reads this), I'm going to
reprint the averages for the classes I've taken so far (but without professor
names attached.)
Class Evaluation Averages for My Courses in Winter and Summer Terms (/7)
501 – 4.8
502 – 6.6
503 – 3.7
504 – 5.8 for one instructor, 4.9 for the other who co-taught it
505 – 4.5
506 – 3.3
525 – 6.1
566 – 6.7
746 – 5.6
(My tenth
course was an independent study so I didn't get to do an evaluation for
it. But my supervisor was the same person who got that 6.7 so you
can imagine how much I enjoyed it!)
Overall, the average for courses I've taken (including the jointly taught one) is 5.2. I suspect this is right in line with what the average of all the classes FIMS offers each semester would be – some are higher, some are lower but they tend to cluster around the 5.0 mark – “solidly average” you might say.
My big frustration is that my two lowest ranked courses by far – 503 and 506 – were both required courses where I had no choice about when I could take it or who the professor was that I would take it with (although to be fair, both were with first-time FIMS instructors so I couldn't have found out about them via evaluation marks – even if I wanted to.)
But without these two, my personal average would jump to 5.6 which is getting away from that 5.0 “solidly average” mark and is heading for the 6.0 “pretty exceptional” range (and tell me I didn't learn anything in stats!)
Anyhow, do I have a point with all this? I guess this just reinforces a personal rule I developed as I went through the program, namely: “A good professor teaching a
class you have no interest in will be vastly more valuable than a bad professor
teaching a class you're really interested in.” In fact, I would go so far as to say that, because the final average is taken from the impressions of the entire class over a wide range of categories, 99% of the averages are going to match up very closely with whether you too will find the professor to be good, bad or average.
So keeping both of those things in mind, my suggestion is that it's worth taking a quick glimpse at these rankings around the time of your next class selection process. Those 6.0+ classes I've taken were all amazing classes (including one
required class I didn't have high hopes for initially based solely on the subject being taught) so in my opinion, it's also well worth it to try to
register for the high-ranked classes as much as possible.
(Oh, and just so you know – the results are kept in a big black binder behind the desk in the GRC labelled “Course Evaluations”. Tell 'em Jason sent you! 
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