Factors Associated With Students' Course Ratings: Class Perceptions and Time Are More Important Than Ease

• In Event: Learning Communities

Abstract

Student course ratings are important at many universities because they are used for personnel decisions. In six different veterinary medicine courses, we examined the extent to which students’ course ratings varied by their motivation-related course perceptions (i.e., empowerment, usefulness, success, interest, and caring), their effort in the course, their perceived ease of the course, and the amount of time that was required to do well in the course. The correlations between course rating and each of the variables were significant for almost all of the course perceptions. Ease of course was not consistently correlated with course ratings, but students rated courses lower when they did not believe that they had the time needed to do well in the course.

Authors

• Brett D. Jones, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Meghan K. Byrnes, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University