Course Feedback Form Template
An end-of-course evaluation that separates content from teaching while covering pacing, workload, the topics that landed, and what to fix before next term.
The course is over; your honest read on it shapes how it runs next term. Grades are done. This changes nothing but the course.
Course evaluations fail in a predictable way: they ask "rate the course" and get back a single number that blends the instructor's delivery, the syllabus design, the workload, and the student's own grade anxiety. This template splits those apart, because a department can fix pacing without replacing an instructor, and an instructor can fix delivery without rewriting the syllabus, but only if the form tells them which lever to pull. University departments run it in the final week of term, bootcamps send it after each module, and independent course creators trigger it at the completion milestone. The document mode suits it: students scroll, think, and revise answers, which one-question-at-a-time flows discourage.
Splitting content from teaching. Content value and instructor effectiveness are deliberately separate scales; the gap between them is the single most diagnostic number in course feedback. High content, low instructor points to delivery; the reverse points to curriculum. Pacing and workload are multiple-choice rather than open text because "too fast" from forty students is a decision, while forty paragraphs about pacing is an afternoon of reading. The taught-you-most question asks for specific topics and assignments, which tells next year's syllabus which weeks earn their place. The next-term question frames improvement as concrete and forward-looking rather than inviting a review of grievances. And the recommend question with its honest middle option, "depends on the student", captures the real texture of academic advice better than a yes/no ever could.
Deliberately absent. Grade expectations (they contaminate everything and invite score-settling), attendance self-reports (unverifiable), and instructor-personality items. We also skipped anonymity-breaking fields like student ID, because candid evaluation requires distance, and the section field gives enough context for aggregation.
Adapting the scale. Swap the free-text course field for a dropdown if you run a fixed catalog, and it makes the CSV export cleanly filterable per course. Add a close date aligned to term end so stragglers do not skew a finished cohort's data. If your institution requires a specific rating scale, both the scale range and its end-labels are editable in place. For multi-instructor courses, duplicate the instructor question per teacher rather than averaging them into one blur.
Earning the response rate. Evaluations completed in scheduled class time reach near-full participation; evaluations left to "please do it this week" reach the motivated extremes and miss the middle. Put the link or QR on the final lecture's closing slide, give it ten protected minutes, and say out loud what changed because of last year's responses, because that single sentence does more for completion than any reminder email chain.
Frequently asked questions
Should evaluations be anonymous?
This template collects no identity by default: no login, no ID field. That is intentional, and candor rises sharply when students trust there is no path back to their grade.
How do I run this for a dozen courses at once?
Either duplicate the form per course, or keep one form and replace the course text field with a dropdown, then filter the CSV export by course when analyzing.
Can I close collection when term ends?
Set a close date in Settings, and you can also cap total responses if you need a fixed sample size.
Students abandon long evaluations. How does this help?
Eight questions, three of them taps. Partial responses are also captured automatically, so even an abandoned form preserves the scales already answered.