Yale College & GSAS Student OCE FAQ
Not only do course evaluations help your instructors improve their teaching, evaluations also are an essential component of the review and promotion process for faculty. This is your opportunity to make your voice heard on an important issue: the quality of teaching at Yale.
Log in to the Online Course Evaluation system with your NetID and password. Students can evaluate courses only during restricted periods at the end of each term.
You are expected to complete an online evaluation, or to decline to do so on the online form, for every eligible course. Yale College regulations state:
For the advancement of teaching in Yale College, anonymous teaching evaluations are made available through the Yale Hub. Students are expected to participate in this evaluation process for any Yale College course in which they are enrolled. Students who withdraw from a course after midterm are invited but not required to participate. (Academic Regulations, Enrollment in Courses)
and
Early access to recorded grades is available online to students in any Yale College course for which they have completed or actively declined to complete the online course evaluation form through the Yale Hub. (Academic Regulations, General Regulations Concerning Grades and Transcripts)
Your evaluations are completely anonymous and confidential. They are stored in their own database from which they will be made available to your instructor with no identifying information, serial number, or other data that would allow your answers to be traced back to you. A separate database records the fact that you have submitted an evaluation but contains none of the content.
Yes. Some instructors will ask you to complete a paper evaluation that contains questions specific to his or her course. These evaluations will be for the professor’s use only and, unlike the online evaluation, will not be made available to other students.
Yale College students are not eligible to complete online evaluations for graduate courses that do not carry a Yale College number.
If the Senior Project course meets the minimum enrollment requirement of 5 of more Yale College students, your Senior Project will be eligible for evaluation. The course evaluation data for Senior Projects will be made available to the DUS of the corresponding department.
Yale College courses must meet a minimum requirement of 5 or more registered students to be eligible for evaluation. Courses that do not meet the minimum enrollment requirement will not be eligible for evaluation.
If there is a course listed on your OCE landing page that you are not registered for, or you think that an error has been made, please e-mail evaluate@yale.edu with your name, NetID, and a brief description of the situation.
No. Once you decline to evaluate a course, there will be no further options to provide an online evaluation. This is designed to prevent evaluations from being influenced by the viewing of grades.
While it is not necessary, you have the ability to prepare your evaluation responses in advance. We recommend using a plain text editor (Notepad, SimpleText, etc.) instead of Microsoft Word since Word contains hidden formulas that can create issues with the evaluation response viewers. When you log into OCE, you can copy and paste your prepared responses into the corresponding evaluation question response field. Each text response field has a 4000-character limit.
Please note that there is a 60-minute time limit for the completion and submission of each course evaluation. If you stay on a course evaluation page for more than 60 minutes without submitting your responses, the application will time out and you will lose all of your work, even if you are still actively entering and editing your responses.
Course evaluation submissions are final, and no edits, deletions or corrections can be made after submission.
No. The system records your completed evaluation for a course and will not present further opportunities for evaluation of that course.
Any computer that has a Yale-supported Web browser and is connected to the Internet will work.
Yes. The Online Course Evaluation system is available from network-connected Web browsers anywhere.
Any information that you entered into the evaluation is lost. You will need to restart your browser and log in to the Online Course Evaluation system again.
Yes. You will be provided with a separate text box for each instructor teaching a course with multiple instructors. Enter your responses under the appropriate faculty names.
Yes. However, the online grade will not be viewable until the end of the course evaluation period.
Log into Yale Hub. View the Grades module to view grades for one term at a time. To view grades for all terms, select Academics in the left menu, and then Grades for All Terms.
Course evaluations are available to Yale College students year round through the Yale Course Search (YCS) site. To view the evaluation data you will need to authenticate into the site using your Yale NetID and password. In the “Search Courses” field, enter the course code and number or the course title, select a term option, and then click the search button. An expanded dialogue box titled “Search Results” will populate, listing the results of the search criteria. Click on the desired course in the search results, which will populate another expanded dialogue box with specific details for the course. Click on the Course Evaluations button located under the “Course Resources” field.
Please note that evaluation responses to questions 1-9 may be made available to students.
1. What knowledge, skills, and insights did you develop by taking this course?
2. Your level of engagement with the course was: (scale: 1=very low, 2=low, 3=medium, 4=high, 5=very high)
3. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this course and how could it be improved?
4. What is your overall assessment of this course?
5. The course was well organized to facilitate student learning. (Scale: 1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neutral, 4=agree, 5=strongly agree)
6. I received clear feedback that improved my learning. (Scale: 1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neutral, 4=agree, 5=strongly agree)
7. Relative to other courses you have taken at Yale, the level of intellectual challenge of this course was: (Scale: 1=much less, 2=less, 3=same, 4=greater, 5=much greater)
8. Relative to other courses you have taken at Yale, the workload of this course was: (scale: 1=much less, 2=less, 3=same, 4=greater, 5=much greater)
9. Would you recommend this course to another student? Please explain.
Please note that evaluation responses to questions 10-12 will not be made available to students.
10. Summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the instructor. In what ways was their teaching effective and in what ways could their teaching be improved?
11. Summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the Teaching Fellow. In what ways was their teaching effective and in what ways could their teaching be improved?
12. What is your overall assessment of the Teaching Fellow?
Current Yale College students are able to view the previous three years of evaluation data for Yale College courses.