Course Instructor Survey Official Policies

Definitions and Acronyms
Provisional Results- are distributed before the results are recognized to allow the instructors access to student feedback before the start of the next semester to improve their teaching.

Recognized Results- are for those classes included in the report to the Texas Higher Education Coordinators Board based on the definition and configuration of classes as sent to us by IMA.

Unrecognized Results – do not meet definition or configuration given by IMA or have been altered at the request of the department.

Convenience Copies- are any copies of the original survey forms kept by faculty or departments.

Frequency Count- are an alternative to official CIS processing. Frequency counts are not included in the University’s official data record, and are not tracked by the CIS department.  A printed summary of results is returned with the original surveys to give the instructor access to student feedback.

CIS- Course Instructor Survey
FERPA- Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
TORA- Texas Open Records Act, also known as Texas Public Information Act
SIS- Student Information Systems, Office of the Registrar
IMA- Office of Information Management and Analysis
OCA- Ongoing Course Assessment
FaSETS- Faculty and Student Electronic Tracking System

University Policy

General

• It is a University requirement “that all classes be surveyed every semester, including summer, using either the Basic CIS Form or the Expanded CIS Form” or another approved CIS form per Educational Policy Committee recommendation and approval from the university president in 2000 (Report from the Educational Policy Committee Concerning “The Report of the Faculty Council ad hoc Committee on Course Instructor Surveys: Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness and Excellence” )
  
  
• Approximate to the 12th class day of the fall and spring, and the 4th class day of the summer semesters, DIIA will send email notification to faculty, department chairs, and department CIS department contacts informing them of paper and electronic CIS procedures.
  
  
• All paper CIS forms are to be anonymous and administered by a student administrator.  Neither the instructor nor a TA is to be present during the evaluation, and neither is to see the completed surveys until grades have been officially reported.  Each college/school/department is responsible for its internal Course Instructor Survey administrative plan. This does not apply to eCIS because it is administered electronically and automatically.

Retention Schedule and Responsibility

• The current records retention period of ten years will continue to be used so that the results are available for the promotion and tenure process. During this time, the designated custodian is responsible for retaining and securing the records.

• The University delegates to each faculty member the responsibility for maintaining for the institution the original forms. Upon the request of the administration, the faculty member will make these records available for use in the reviews of the faculty member.  Regardless of where a government document is stored, it remains the property of the State of Texas.  As such, the University has the right to determine the location or repository where it will be stored.  The official state record document must remain retrievable from the time it is created until its final disposition.  The documents must be maintained for no more than10 years per UT Records Retention Schedule.

• CIS forms are official University documents and the act of delivering the original documents to individual faculty members does NOT make the forms personal property. Any copies (sometimes referred to as “convenience copies”) of the original forms are still University property and NOT the property of the faculty member.

• The faculty shall return the original documents to the University when requested to do so.

• The official state record must be destroyed following the official approval process at the end of the retention period.  It is best practice to destroy convenience copies at or before the end of the retention period or as soon as they have served their purpose.  If the original survey documents are destroyed but convenience copies exist they become the official documentation even if kept beyond the official retention period.  As such they fall under the Texas Public Information Act and Texas Open Records Act (TORA).  Upon an open records request or subpoena, they must be produced.

• When a faculty member terminates his/her employee relationship with the university, any college/school/department is responsible for ensuring that the Course Instructor Survey official records are handled in accordance with university policy for official records.

Student Privacy

• The results of the Course Instructor Surveys, including the handwritten comments by students, are official University records and are ultimately managed by the University.  As official University records, they are subject to provisions of the Family Education and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Texas Public Information Act, Texas Open Records Act (TORA), and the Records Retention Schedule.

• All CIS documents whether in paper or electronic form are official University documents, and are available to the public upon request in accordance with the Texas Public Information Act. The Texas Attorney General is responsible for enforcing and interpreting the Act and has held that handwritten student comments are excepted from disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act because handwriting is identifiable, and personally identifiable information about students is confidential pursuant to federal law. Moreover, the University is not under obligation to type those comments that might make them available.  www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2006-2007/reports/eCIS.html

• eCIS typed student comments are subject to open records requests after review and redaction, as are any hand written student comments that are subsequently typed by a faculty member or department.

• To the extent the completed Course Instructor Survey forms contain FERPA protected information, access to these documents must be controlled to protect information from disclosure to third parties.

• Only persons performing a legitimate supervisory or educational task may view hand written student comments.  Legitimate supervisory and educational tasks include annual reviews, three-year reviews, promotion and tenure reviews, post-tenure reviews, and improving teaching.

Results Accessibility

• Students may not view their final course grade from the Registrar’s Office prior to completion of the survey.

• Faculty may not view their survey results prior to the grade submission deadline.  CIS returns provisional paper results by college as each college is completed and checked.  eCIS provisional results are available 2 days after official grade submission deadline.  All officially recognized results (paper and electronic) will be viewable at the same time. 

• The 11 items on the basic form are also on the expanded form, and the ratings on nine of these items are automatically released and put online for use by the university community, when the survey is administered in a recognized class. Only individuals in the active UT community can access these results.
  
  

Information Flow Policies

General

• Recognized CIS information conforms to Student Information System (SIS) and Information Management and Analysis (IMA; previously OIR) data in the aspects of:
• Instructor of Record
• Unique numbers and groupings of unique numbers
• Which courses are organized and which are Individual Instruction
• Class enrollments

• Instructors may choose to administer either a paper CIS or an electronic CIS but not both.

Individual Instruction

• We receive course information on Individual Instruction (II) classes from the Office of Information Management and Analysis (IMA).  The format we receive Individual Instructions in is one course listing per enrolled student. 

• CIS has the ability to create a single unrecognized record (formatted as “A####”) containing the sum of enrollment for Individual Instruction (II) classes.  We can do this upon request by a departmental chair.  We cannot do this at the individual instructor level. These records are considered unrecognized CIS results.

• Individual Instruction (II) courses will not have results displayed online.

CIS Procedure

• Information on academic departments not considered “official” by IMA is not passed to CIS.  Contacts in these departments must enter their course requests on the CIS survey request site. These records are unrecognized CIS records and will not generate recognized CIS results.

• Only courses with valid unique numbers from the registrar’s office will be able to be surveyed electronically.  The registrar’s office provides the course information data for the Course Instructor Survey administration system. Unofficial departments cannot use the eCIS.

• The opening date for the CIS request system is contingent on when the University- wide course data is received from IMA. The date is set with enough time for the data to be received and tested for compatibility prior to the opening of the request system.

• The closing date for the CIS request system is set far enough beyond the opening date to give departmental contacts ample time to enter a semester’s survey requests.  The closing date will be enforced to allow the CIS office sufficient time to prepare, pack, and deliver packets to the entire UT Austin campus before the survey period begins.

• Bar-coded labels are printed from the CIS request system. The bar-coded labels are put on paper CIS packets to ensure monitoring and inventory of the packets.  These labels should not be altered in any way.

• The official survey period is the last two weeks of each long semester and the last week of each shorter summer session.  When authorized by the department, paper surveys may be requested and conducted prior to the official survey period for situations such as team taught courses.

• Colleges/schools/departments are responsible for management of official CIS documents at three points: a) the survey administration phase, b) the internal distribution of results, and c) the document retention phase. 
  
  
• Faculty members may request that survey packets be rescanned for perceived incorrect results. Original survey forms must be returned to the CIS office by the 2nd Friday of classes of the following semester in order to be rescanned. Any requests for scanning after this deadline must be made by the dean or chair and will produce a frequency count only.
• The frequency count data will not be included in aggregated CIS data.
• A cover memorandum will be prepared and accompany the frequency count report.  It will state the reason for the frequency count report and that it will not be included in the aggregated data

Special Survey Administration

• In the case of multiple instructors, or instructor and TA teams, the students should be explicitly informed of the instructor they are expected to evaluate.  For paper the name of the person on the packet and the course information should be displayed where it is visible to all. For electronic the information is at the top of the page.

• If an instructor and a TA or multiple instructors are each evaluated in the same class period, each survey should be administered separately.  Do not distribute two or more surveys simultaneously.

• Instructors who teach individual students will require special arrangements for the student to complete the survey form.  As with all administered CIS the instructor should not see the completed survey form before processing by the CIS department.

• Departments should establish a secure place for after hours drop offs so that the department can maintain the inventory and provide better protection of confidentiality.  As an alternative, a CIS drop-box will be located at the Texas Union during the two-week survey period (and only for those two weeks).  Students may use the drop-box for after-hours surveys. For inventory control, CIS will check-in each survey packet retrieved from the Texas Union box each day after the survey envelopes are retrieved.

Recognized Results Requirements

• CIS will process all packets returned to the CIS office except those that have been altered. Examples include but are not limited to those that have an unofficial label, have mixed forms, have forms from separate classes in the same packet, or have instructor names switched on the original packets.

• Unprocessed surveys do not produce recognized results for either the instructor or the University’s official data records. Frequency counts may be requested when a packet is not able to be officially processed.

• A unique number grouping whose configuration is changed will remain a recognized record provided the constituent uniques remain consistent. 

Results Access

• Surveys for classes that match the IMA records are posted online for any member of the active University community to view.  If the instructor used a form other than the Basic Form (Form B), the instructor, the dean, and chair overseeing the class will be able to view results for the entire form.  Others will only be able to view the nine questions determined to be public domain.
  
  

CIS Policy

Forms

• When making a request, only the following aspects may be changed:
• Survey Request types: None, Paper, and Electronic
• Survey form selected: these options include the Basic form, Expanded form, and other forms supported by your college or school
• “Add unique numbers to be surveyed with” allows you to add or modify additional unique numbers that meet with the primary class
• If groups are set or changed so that they do not conform to IMA data, the results will not be recognized.

• Each academic unit has a pre-selected list of specific survey forms that instructors are allowed to select from.  These forms are selected by the dean or chair of each academic unit.  CIS contacts may choose any one of these for a given class and instructor.  Any form not on the pre-selected list may not be selected unless the dean submits an approval request to the CIS office. Requests for change to the acceptable survey form options list must be made by the dean to the CIS office.

• CIS must receive dean’s requests for new or modified college-wide supplemental forms at the beginning of the fall semester in the academic year before the planned implementation semester (ex: planned implementation: FA08, CIS must receive the request by FA07). Requests for forms for individual courses or instructors will not be fulfilled.

• An instructor may include his/her own multiple-choice items to the paper CIS.  The Student Administrator is responsible for the distribution or communication of the optional questions. The instructor should retain a copy of his/her questions in order to interpret the results. Students should respond to the instructor’s own questions in the optional questions section of the survey form. There is space for 20 questions, and each question may have up to five response options.  To view suggested items go to
  http://www.utexas.edu/academic/diia/assessment/iar/teaching/plan/method/survey-cisChoice.php

Teaching Assistants and Assistant Instructors

• Formally appointed Teaching Assistants and Assistant Instructors are eligible to be reported to IMA. If a college/school/department wants to track its TAs/AIs, it will need to enter them into FaSETS.   The CIS departmental contacts must manually add any TAs and AIs through the online request system that do not have formal appointments.

Processing for Results

• Departments must return completed surveys to the CIS office for processing within two weeks of the last class day.  Electronic CIS closes at midnight on the last class day. Any paper packet received after this deadline will only have frequency counts and will not be recognized.

• CIS processes all paper surveys, including “early” surveys after the last class day of the semester. Requests for scanning or processing results before the last class day will be denied. 
  
  
• If an instructor wants an unofficial survey anytime during the semester, he or she should use the Ongoing Course Assessment online survey tool for that purpose.  CIS does not provide unofficial surveys mid-semester.

• Requests for customized reports require a formal written (email) request from the dean to the Associate Director of Instruction Assessment and Evaluation. Requests will be considered based on available time and resources.

All Policies are subject to change.