Central Evaluation Service

If a course you are attending is submitted for evaluation, you will receive a personal invitation to participate via the email address registered in your UniAccount. To be included in the evaluation, you must be enrolled in the course through HISinOne. If you have not received an email to complete the evaluation, please inform your instructor.

Either your faculty’s curriculum committee did not select the course for evaluation, for example because it had very few participants, or you did not enrol in the course via the HISinOne campus management system, or you did so too late. If you have not received an email inviting you to complete the evaluation, please inform your instructor or contact your faculty’s evaluation coordinator.

Student course evaluations are an opportunity for you to share your views on various aspects of the course and to offer praise and suggestions for improvement. Your feedback is intended to help the instructor reflect on the course’s content and structure and make improvements in the future where necessary. Instructors are encouraged to discuss the evaluation results with students in a feedback session in order to consider the responses in detail. This provides an opportunity to discuss elements of teaching that were especially beneficial for learning, as well as to address any issues promptly – in some cases even resolving them during the current semester. When providing feedback, please try to be as specific and objective as possible. A successful feedback session depends on the instructor’s willingness to engage in self-reflection and be open to suggestions for improvement, as well as on students’ ability to offer constructive criticism.

Neben dem Feedback für Ihre Lehrperson(en) sollen durch ihre Rückmeldungen Verbesserungsmaßnahmen für den gesamten Bereich Studium und Lehre an Ihrer Fakultät angeregt werden.

The curriculum committees of the faculties are responsible for selecting the courses to be evaluated. Decisions are generally made at the beginning of the semester. If you have any questions about the selection process, please contact your faculty’s evaluation coordinator. 

Completing the questionnaire takes approximately 10-15 minutes. Instructors are encouraged allow time during the course for students to complete the evaluation. You are welcome to remind your instructor of this during the evaluation period.

Compliance with the applicable data-protection regulations and the anonymity of your responses are ensured throughout the entire evaluation process. Once you have completed the evaluation, there is no way to trace your responses back to you. To further protect your anonymity, at least five students must complete a questionnaire before a results report is generated for the instructor. It is still important to ensure that you do not include any identifying personal details in the free-text fields. Detailed information on data protection can be found in the Information on data protection. If you have questions about data protection, please contact the Central Evaluation Service or the University of Freiburg’s Data Protection Officer.

Your email address is needed to invite you to participate in the online questionnaire and to enable that the questionnaire to be displayed in ILIAS. It is used to generate a personalised access link and send reminder emails if necessary. Once you have completed the questionnaire, no link between your feedback and your email address is retained. Your individual responses cannot be traced back to you.

Your faculty’s curriculum committee sets the timeframe for the online evaluation each semester. Evaluations generally take place during the final third of the course. You will be notified by email when the evaluation period begins.

Once the evaluation period has ended, the results are sent to the instructor responsible for the course.  The responsible dean of studies at your faculty also has access to the results and can discuss them with the curriculum committee. The regulations governing the sharing of course evaluation results can also be found in Sections 8 and 11 of the University of Freiburg’s statutes on internal quality assurance and quality development in the area of teaching and learning.

If you have further questions about how course evaluations are designed and conducted at the University of Freiburg, please contact the responsible evaluation coordinator at your faculty.  For technical enquiries, please contact the Central Evaluation Service at evaluation@eval.uni-freiburg.de.

Evaluations are conducted using the “evasys” software, a web-based survey tool that enables (partly) automated analysis of questionnaires.

The following guidelines are recommended as the basis for productive feedback discussions and constructive comments in the free-text fields:

– Identify and describe the specific situation

– Express criticism using “I” statements (I think it would be better if … / I would prefer if …)

– Offer concrete suggestions: how could things be improved?

– Ensure that critical comments are factual and constructive, not personal. Support your comments with specific examples, for example by explaining what exactly gave you this impression.

Once the evaluation period has ended, a summary of the results of the course evaluation is sent to the instructor responsible for the course. Instructors are encouraged to discuss the results with students and reflect on them together. This requires instructors and students to engage in an open discussion of the results. A successful feedback session depends on the instructor’s willingness to engage in self-reflection and be open to suggestions for improvement, as well as on students’ ability to offer constructive criticism. In aggregated form, the results of the course evaluation also serve as a basis for the curriculum committees’ quality development work in the area of learning and teaching.

In addition to the invitation to participate in the evaluation, you will generally receive at least one reminder email with a link to the evaluation. All ongoing evaluations can also be found on your personal ILIAS homepage in the “Your Online-Surveys” notification box.

If you attended the course for a while and wish to provide feedback, you are welcome to participate in the evaluation. However, this only applies if you feel you have attended enough course sessions to form an opinion about the course and be able to offer feedback. If applicable, you may also explain why you only attended the course sporadically or did not complete it, if the reasons was related to the course itself.

Once you have completed and submitted the evaluation, no further changes can be made. For reasons of data protection, there is no way to identify which responses were submitted by you once the evaluation has been sent.

Under Section 5 of the Act on the Higher Education Institutions in the Land of Baden-Württemberg (LHG), students are required to cooperate in course evaluations. The ZES team is therefore authorised to invite you in your capacity as a student to participate in the relevant surveys. However, active participation in course and module evaluations is voluntary.

The results of the evaluation should be discussed in detail in a feedback session with students in the course. You are welcome to remind the instructor(s) responsible for the course about the evaluation and let them know you would like to discuss the results. In some cases, the absence of a feedback session may be due to the timing of the evaluation period, which can occasionally extend into the non-teaching period.

The course evaluation questionnaire can be completed in German or English. You can change the language by clicking on the flag symbol in the survey interface.

The online evaluations include a high-contrast mode. This is an important feature that improves the accessibility of digital content, especially for people with visual impairments or colour-vision deficiencies. It allows users to increase the visual contrast between the text and the background, making the material easier to read. The HTML content generated by the evaluation software is also optimised for accessibility and structured so that it can be recognised by screen readers and read aloud to support better understanding.

The curriculum committees of the faculties are responsible for selecting the courses to be evaluated. Decisions are generally made at the beginning of the semester.

The curriculum committees of the faculties set the timeframe for evaluations. The purpose of student course evaluations is to provide feedback to the teaching staff and to encourage communication with students about the course. For this reason, evaluations are generally scheduled during the final third of the teaching period (approximately weeks 10–14 of the semester). This allows the results reports to be prepared before the teaching period ends so that the results can be discussed with students.

Please encourage your students to participate in the evaluation and allow time during the course for them to complete the questionnaire. This is the only way to ensure that you receive meaningful feedback. Completing the questionnaire takes approximately 10-15 minutes. Please remind your students that ongoing evaluations can also be found on their personal ILIAS homepage in the “Your Online-Surveys” notification box.

The university-wide core questionnaire is mandatory for all evaluation units. The curriculum committee may supplement this questionnaire with specific questions. The ZES is available to advise in this process. All evaluations are conducted exclusively online. It is not possible for instructors to add their own questions to a specific course evaluation. 

Currently, foreign language questionnaires are only offered in English. Most faculties and evaluation units use both English and German questionnaires. When students open the questionnaire, they can decide whether to complete it in German or in English. If the results report is to be sent in English, the evaluation coordinator must inform the ZES. If this was not arranged beforehand, instructors are welcome to contact the evaluation coordinator or the ZES afterwards to request an English-language report.

For reasons of data protection, evaluations may only be analysed if the ZES has received more than five completed questionnaires. Evaluations with fewer than five responses will not be analysed and will be destroyed without delay. See also: The information on data protection as well as the University of Freiburg’s statutes on internal quality assurance and quality development in the area of teaching and learning.

The instructor receives the results of their own course evaluations promptly after the evaluation period ends. The results of all courses in the faculty/teaching unit are additionally made available to the respective dean of studies. The dean of studies also receives an overall report and an average-score report for all course evaluations that could be analysed. These results are generally also provided to the curriculum committee. In accordance with the University of Freiburg’s statutes on internal quality assurance and quality development in the area of teaching and learning, a Faculty Council resolution may designate additional persons to be granted access to the results reports in order to further improve the quality of learning and teaching. Your evaluation coordinator or the dean of studies can let you know whether this applies your evaluation unit.

The standard report presents the frequency distribution, mean values and standard deviation for each individual item. You will also receive a list of students’ responses to free-text questions. The results report will generally be sent to your email address as a PDF document after the conclusion of the evaluation period. If you have not consented to receiving unencrypted emails from the ZES, you will receive the reports from the respective evaluation coordinators. Please keep in mind that in this case, your receipt of the reports may be delayed.

When the evaluation period ends, you will automatically receive an email from the Central Evaluation Service. Provided that at least five students have taken part in the evaluation, this email will also include the results report as a PDF. If a report could not be generated, you will be informed of this in the email.

The evaluation is intended to give you personal feedback on your teaching, thereby allowing you to continuously improve your courses. We recommend that you discuss the results of the evaluation in detail with your students. This requires instructors and students to engage in an open discussion of the results. For example, you might select specific aspects of the evaluation that you would like to discuss and ask the students for additional comments. Address both problems that can be resolved during the current semester as well as elements of your teaching that have had a particularly positive impact on your students’ learning. You should ask students for feedback that is as specific and factual as possible and schedule enough time for discussion during the course session. A successful feedback session depends not only on your willingness to engage in self-reflection and be open to suggestions for improvement, but also on the students’ ability to offer constructive criticism. Further recommendations for how to handle the results of the course evaluation can be found here.

If you have further questions about how course evaluations are designed and conducted at the University of Freiburg, please contact the responsible evaluation coordinator at your faculty.  For technical enquiries, please contact the Central Evaluation Service at evaluation@eval.uni-freiburg.de.

Either your faculty did not submit your course for evaluation, we were given an incorrect email address or instructor, or you did not consent to receive unencrypted emails. It is also possible that several instructors are responsible for overseeing and teaching your course. In this case, only the person your faculty listed as the primary instructor will receive an email with information at the start of the evaluation. The results report will be sent to the primary instructor as well as all secondary instructors. If you have any further questions in this regard, please contact the relevant evaluation coordinator.

In this case, please send an email to the relevant evaluation coordinator at your faculty. At the end of the evaluation phase, the results for the semester are compiled and forwarded to the office of the dean of studies of your faculty. The Central Evaluation Services does not save or archive the results reports from previous evaluation periods.

Please inform the relevant evaluation coordinator. If needed, the evaluation timeframe can be extended or adjusted.

If the current response rate for your course evaluation falls below the set threshold, you will automatically be notified. The threshold is defined by your faculty/evaluation unit as a guideline. The information about the response rate is intended to prompt you to remind your students about the ongoing evaluation. This doesn’t mean that you will not receive a results report. The decisive factor for receiving a results report is that as least five completed questionnaires are returned.

For data protection reasons and to protect anonymity, a results report cannot be issued if fewer than five course participants completed the questionnaire. In such cases, the results cannot be retrieved from the evaluation software.

Please inform your evaluation coordinator right away so that students have the opportunity to evaluate the course with the correct instructor and that instructor can receive the results report.

The ZES exports the email addresses of students and instructors from the HISinOne campus management system. These addresses are then forwarded to the relevant evaluation unit for verification. If your email address has changed, please notify your evaluation coordinator so that your address is updated in our evaluation software and reports on ongoing or completed evaluations can subsequently be sent from our system. To ensure that future evaluation results are sent to your current email address, it is also essential that you verify that the correct email address is on file in HISinOne.

If individual students did not receive an invitation email from us, this may be because the course registration procedure either isn’t available in HISinOne or wasn’t completed by the deadline (see current schedule). Please also tell affected students to check their SPAM folder. Additionally, you can let your students know that ongoing evaluations can also be found on their personal ILIAS homepage in the “Your online evaluations” notification box.

You can contact the Department of Higher Education Didactics and Digital Learning and Teaching Development for information and advice on alternative evaluation methods.

The evaluations are conducted using the “evasys” software, a web-based survey tool that enables automated analysis of questionnaires.