Summative Evaluation of Teaching

The main deliverable of a Summative Evaluation of teaching is an overall assessment of the teaching performance of an instructor, often used for accountability purpose and in making personnel decision. Hence, summative evaluation of teaching is often conducted by a central unit at the school or university level using standardized procedures to ensure the comparability of evaluation results across the school or university, as the case may be.

At HKUST, student feedback questionnaire surveys have been used as a means of summative evaluation of teaching, though not necessarily the only means, when the university was first established. At the beginning, it was called “course evaluation” and centrally administered using printed forms by a unit under the then Educational Technology Center, the Instructional Development Unit (IDU). In 1999, with funding from UGC, an online system, COSSET (Centralized On-line System for Student Evaluation of Teaching), was developed to allow the course evaluation exercise to be conducted online. COSSET was later replaced by ASSET (Academic Survey System and Evaluation Tool), a new system with an improved interface and better integration with the university’s IT infrastructure.  By embedding part of the ASSET’s services into the University’s Learning Management System, students can now complete questionnaires, and faculty and instructors can view student feedback reports through the Canvas, the University's current Learning Management System.

In parallel with the implementation of ASSET, the University introduced the Student Feedback Questionnaires (SFQs) to replace the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ). In fall 2008, the final version of SFQs was deployed through ASSET to collect students’ feedback about their course learning experience. Since then, the number of questionnaires for different teaching and learning contexts has increased gradually over the years as non-traditional pedagogical approaches (e.g. Blended learning) have expanded.

In fall 2015, student surveys, including SFQs, moved to the Office of Institutional Research (OIR) and they now operate student surveys on behalf of the Executive Vice President and Provost (EVPP).