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‘Without Feedback, Improvement Is Impossible’
© HSE University
HSE University has a highly developed feedback culture—students can evaluate and comment on their courses and instructors, elect the best teachers, reflect on the quality of the educational process, or use the Hotline button to report on urgent study issues. Analysts from the HSE Feedback and Internal Assessment Unit have gathered statistics on how students use the most prominent feedback channel: the Student Evaluation of Teaching.
What is SET?
The Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) is the primary instrument for providing feedback on the educational process at HSE University. SET is conducted four times a year: at the end of each study module, students should rate and comment on courses that have exams in the following exam week.
The questionnaire comprises several sections:
- For courses, students evaluate the future career and personal development value of each subject, as well as its novelty of knowledge and the difficulty of its completion.
- For instructors, students reflect on how clearly they explain a course’s requirements and deliver study materials, along with the quality of communication with the teacher and their openness to extracurricular academic discussions.
Students can also share their views on other types of study experience, MOOCs, project activity, or the educational process in general.
Not only does SET allow students to give numerical grades, but it also lets them leave thorough reviews via comments. This makes it easier to explain the underlying problems in a course’s organisation or support a teacher with praise. Comments are grouped into several specific fields for each course and each instructor: one field is for positive and successful practices, while the other is for unsuccessful decisions and suggestions for their correction.
SET is a very widespread practice: every year, HSE students evaluate the work of about 8,000 instructors and the content of about 10,000 courses. This is a key mechanism for regular feedback in the educational process.
How do students fill out SET?
SET has two key principles. The first is that it is mandatory for all students. This allows the university administration to make decisions on summarised data rather than on feedback from a random handful of students. For example, during each module (four times a year) in the 2022–2023 academic year, between 40,000 and 44,000 students left their feedback in SET, depending on the content of their individual curricula.
In addition, the questionnaire is anonymous. No one can connect the numerical scores and comments with the exact name of the student who left them; thus, it is easier to leave truthful and thorough comments. This allows students to write feedback honestly and in detail, while instructors and administrators can listen to everyone and make decisions based on aggregated data.
SET serves two purposes: the main one (with a full set of ratings and comments) is to assess how well a course was implemented near its completion. The secondary one (with comments only) is to provide feedback during a course and make adjustments while it's still ongoing.
How does HSE University use SET results?
SET results are most popular among teachers. Statistics on numerical scores and comments clearly show them which topics and formats were liked by students and which ones weren’t, as well as how students evaluated the quality of study materials and assignments. SET data also allows instructors to gauge their personal development—this can be seen either through students’ reaction to experiments (eg new gamified in-class assignments) or by looking at the bigger picture (eg when a grading system is updated annually).
For details on how teachers use SET results, see this page.
SET results also come in handy for departments, schools and faculty administration. The data helps them determine which instructors should teach which courses the next year, and who would be better suited to a different workload. Student voices are essential—the numerical scores help identify different categories of teachers based on SET results, while comments highlight issues regarding specific teachers. You can discover more use cases and administrators’ personal experience when working with SET here.
SET data is increasingly useful for the academic supervisors of educational programmes. When drawing up curricula, they pay attention to scores and comments, so that they are aware of which courses should be proposed to students in the following years, when to change a subject’s volume and content, and whether to make them elective or change the audience.
To see more scenarios and academic supervisors’ views on SET, visit this page.
Finally, the results of the SET are important for the overall governance agenda of the university. In addition to continuously monitoring potential problem areas and issues, they, for example, help calculate key performance indicators for deans of faculties and academic directors of educational programmes, as well as many other indicators for different purposes of university management.
Feedback and Internal Assessment Unit Head, Centre for Institutional Research
‘SET is the most extensive, regular, and significant project of the Centre for Institutional Research. Without feedback, improvement is impossible, and SET ensures this feedback for the educational process at all levels. Student evaluations of teaching have long proven themselves to be one of the leading tools for internal quality monitoring in almost all significant universities worldwide, regardless of their geographical location. However, the SET system at HSE University is far from static: we regularly seek and find possible directions for improvements and innovations. In recent years, we have introduced the evaluation of project activities, online course assessment, and the opportunity to provide feedback on ongoing courses. New, more convenient and stable modules for viewing results have been developed for teachers, as have dashboards for university management. Through regular teacher monitoring surveys, we know how important SET is for them, and we strive to make the process of dealing with its results as convenient as possible.
The role of students in the SET system goes beyond just filling out surveys. Various student research groups, including student representation bodies, regularly analyse the survey results after signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Academic directors of educational programmes, as well as teachers, often discuss the SET results with students. Overall, HSE University has successfully fostered a culture of feedback, with all stakeholders invested in improving education quality, with a widespread readiness to listen and consider different perspectives, and with an institutional and technological platform to support all these features.’