Feedback

No one can deny the merits of taking feedback from the students about the courses being taught to them, about their teachers, about the facilities being provided to them by different departments, examination system, cultural and sports activities and all those things in which students are involved. There are large number of institutes in the world who already use this mechanism to bring improvement in the procedures, in teaching, in rectifying the dysfunctions of the organization. Yes, first and foremost thing in dealing with this issue is the intension of authorities to perform this exhaustive exercise at the end of every semester. Taking feedback from the students merely for the purpose of checking the credibility of a teacher without taking in consideration, for example, the complexity of the subject being taught by the teacher, clearly speaks about the wrong intension of authorities and other governing bodies who propose to allocate points to students’ feedback while calculating the score of a teacher for yearly increment. Here the intension is to bring the teachers under axe, which is not acceptable to the teachers and has already resulted in criticism in the academic fraternity. Before making the exercise of taking feedback mandatory, there is a question which needs to be answered. Is it sufficient to ask a student whether he/she is satisfied from the subjects being taught to him/her? Obviously no, because there are number of variables which lead to the satisfaction of a student. So what comes after Intension of authorities is the properly designed questionnaire. Formulating a questionnaire requires lots of efforts, review of literature and finally approval of an expert. If students are not satisfied in some subject, that does not mean that teacher is incompetent, for, there may be lot of other reasons for the dissatisfaction of students which should be apparent from the questionnaire. Some of the reasons of dissatisfaction of students may be the syllabus itself, timing of the class, location and construct of classroom, lack of teaching aids, complexity of a subject, incorrect procedures, non availability of a book in library, and need for prerequisite etc. Incompetence of teacher being one of factors discussed above does not always mean that teacher is short of knowledge and expertise. The problem may lie in his expression, continuous evaluation, regularity, controlling classroom, conduct and etiquettes of a teacher. Another factor which has got a lot of weight and is nearly impossible to check is the bias of a student. In countries like ours, where students come from different religious/regional/cast backgrounds and particularly these days when the hatred for a particular community in a particular region is touching heights, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to measure the affect of bias on students’ feedback.
What comes after designing a proper questionnaire is, when and how to conduct the feedback session? Conducting feedback sessions by the end of each semester for each subject seems appropriate. It can be done by filling up questionnaire by each student either on paper or online. Whatever the medium may be, it should ensure the anonymity of student and should be filled up thoughtfully. Most important thing, lack of which, can lead to the failure of whole feedback system is the confidentiality. If the intension of taking feedback from students is to bring improvement and not to target a teacher, then confidentiality plays the role of foundation stone for the whole system. Whatever a report of a feedback maybe, only the concerned teacher should come to know about the result. So what is required to be done is that whole procedure, be it the collection of data, analysis of data, storage of documents and sending a report to a concerned teacher, should be confidential.
Last thing which I would like to add here is that the comparison of teachers on the basis of single feedback would be a disaster, so it is better not to disclose the results after every single feedback. If a particular teacher in a particular subject scores low consecutively for 2 to 3 times, then only report should be forwarded to him and the corrective measures in consultation with that teacher should be taken.