Achieving excellence in teaching is tightly germane to high quality in higher education.  In order to safeguard the quality of teaching activities at higher education institutions, particularly universities, a wide range of methods have so far been used. In the literature, student course evaluation appears as one of the most frequently consulted way of assessing the quality and effectiveness of teaching activities engaged by the university professors. This endeavor is enhanced through the administration of course evaluation questionnaires by end of each academic semester.

Its use dating back to as early as the 1920s (Cashin, 1989), consulting students’ perceptions to evaluate the courses is considered a cheap means for gathering and providing valuable information (Serdyukova, Tatum, & Serdyukov, 2010). In this approach to course evaluation, students who are in direct contact with the instructors for long hours are regarded to provide rich information about teaching; information that an external evaluator cannot offer (Aleamoni & Hexner, 1980). With their increased use in the 1980s, these evaluations serve many purposes including providing feedback to faculty members about the quality of their instruction, establishing criteria for the university administration to make decisions about faculty members, informing students about the effectiveness of the courses, establishing national and international quality standards on instruction, and allowing for research on the effectiveness of instruction (Marsh, 2007).

There, however, has been much debate on the validity and reliability of student evaluation of courses. Several studies stressed that a number of factors considered irrelevant to teacher effectiveness (e.g., elective/compulsory status, class size, difficulty level of the course, title of the instructor, students’ gender, and grade expectations) may potentially lead to bias in students’ judgments (Wachtel, 1998). Consistently, based on the belief that students are not enough equipped to make objective evaluations (Sojka, Gupta, & Deeter-Schmelz, 2002), faculty members appeared to be concerned especially about their use in summative decisions and also restrict the amount of change or improvement they make in their courses after the evaluation results (Nasser & Fresko, 2002).

The stance of faculty members on student course evaluation is considered critically important because they constitute the primary body of stakeholders influenced by the results of these evaluation. Yet, as a comprehensive and large-scale study (N=3490 students) on student course evaluations stressed, if this practice is to deliver its promises, effective use of the evaluation results by faculty members to improve their courses should be ensured (Cobanoglu & Capa-Aydin, 2013).

On the other hand, few studies appear to have thoroughly investigated the perceptions of faculty members in an in-depth manner and opened a way for their suggestions about the improvement of both student evaluations and the evaluation of their courses in the broader sense. This study, therefore, aimed at gathering faculty perspectives to determine the evaluation needs and improve university-wide instructional implementations. The results of this study are promising since they inform the very practice of student course evaluations. Yet, the findings can be of benefit for other European higher education institutions who intend to improve their course evaluation systems.  

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