Faculty ratings of course evaluation items

Instructors whose teaching was evaluated by students were given the opportunity to rate how applicable the evaluation items were to their classes. This study examined the kinds of items which instructors felt to be applicable or inapplicable, the relationships between the student ratings and the instructor applicability ratings, and the effect on an overall evaluation score of using the instructor applicability judgments as weights.Results generally support the consensus procedure of establishing rating forms; they suggest that the common criticism that faculty judgments of item applicability are influenced by anticipation of student ratings may be true for specific items and that while weighting composite evaluation scores by means of faculty applicability judgments does not affect those overall scores, the distributions of certain items may be altered.