Student evaluation: its worth for course tutors

As part of their evaluation of the 9-week 'Medicine in the Community' course, final-year medical students completed a terminal evaluation questionnaire. Items and subject groupings were scored using a scale of 1-5 for 'value', 'interest', and 'presentation', and mean evaluations were calculated for each group of students. The results, summarized in tabular form, were posted to the seventy-three course tutors together with the mean evaluations of the course as a whole. It was hoped that this feedback on the course would help tutors to improve the standard of their contributions. After 2 years of this evaluation, a questionnaire was sent to the course tutors to examine whether student opinion is useful to them in the planning of teaching. Findings indicate that student opinion is actively sought and the results are useful, but only if tutors can identify their individual contributions from the tabulated summary.