Course Evaluation Completion Over Student Careers and Policy Impacts

Session Abstract: Student course evaluations play a central role in demonstrating instructional quality and informing high-stakes decisions such as tenure, promotion, and merit. However, low and uneven response rates raise serious concerns about validity and fairness of the results. This session highlights how one campus improved completion rates from 32% in Fall 2022 to 77% in Spring 2024, through a coordinated set of strategies, including LMS/portal nudges, suppression-aware reminders, temporary Canvas content blocking, and centralized administration. We will also demonstrate how the IR office can assess the impact of such policies using accessible statistical approaches, including regression discontinuity designs and hierarchical logistic regression with lagged terms to capture habit formation. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to boost participation, strengthen the representativeness of evaluation results, and apply practical analytic methods that can be adapted to their own campuses.

Keywords: Course evaluation, prediction, policy impact, evaluation completion behavior