This fall launches a significantly revised Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) instrument (http://setwayne.weebly.com/news.html)

The 2N SET Committee has worked closely with the Student Senate, Academic Senate Policy Committee, Course Evaluation Office, and senior academic administrators with the goals of increasing student response rates for the SET and making the SET more useful to faculty.

To that end, a series of changes to the SET process will be inaugurated in Fall 2014, including:

1. The 22 question SET protocol contains a total of 19 significantly revised questions, with revisions which are intended to reflect better what a student can best judge about a course and instructor.
   
2. The three items used for tenure and promotion (previously Questions 1, 2 and 24) are now co-located at the bottom of the form and continue to be confidential
   
3. Instructors are able to add up to ten unique questions tailored for their course goals and suitable for a range of kinds of instruction (e.g. lab, lecture, discussion; beginning vs. advanced seminars; differences in content), as well as accommodating traditional, hybrid, and online course contexts
   
4. The newly revised questionnaire will be implemented for all Fall 2014 courses
   
5. With a WSU access ID, students and faculty will have online access to all the results of the first 19 questions beginning in summer 2015.

The goal of these changes is to make SET results more relevant and helpful to students, instructors, and academic administrators. For students, it is hoped that the release of SET data will be a catalyst to higher and more complete participation by students in the course evaluation process. (As historical context, you will recall that the publication of SET data was standard practice at Wayne State University until recently and stopped only due to budget constraints related to the publication of the data). For instructors, these changes come in the current context of broader emphasis on excellence in all forms of instruction as expressed in the Strategic Plan; newly approved and encouraged peer observation of teaching is another aspect of this wider emphasis.

Students and faculty will be invited to give regular feedback to improve how students access and use these data.