Student Evaluations of Courses, Clerkships, & Faculty

One of the essential professional attributes of a physician is a commitment to life-long learning and improvement of systems that enhance patient care and the health of the population. The UF COM medical education program recognizes that learning occurs through both individual and collaborative study, thoughtful reflection and self-assessment, patient interactions, and formal and informal interactions with faculty, house staff and other members of the health care team.

Effective learning occurs with a bidirectional flow of information, such that learners become teachers and performance of both the learner and the teacher improves. Thus, there is a professional expectation that students will provide feedback for each educational experience (e.g. course, clerkship) in order to improve the quality of our teaching and curriculum.

The Office of Educational Affairs in the College of Medicine continually and systematically collects, uses, and responds to students’ feedback through online questionnaires and small group debriefings. Numeric results and students’ written comments are carefully reviewed by faculty, department chairs, and the Evaluation committee to reward faculty efforts and promote positive curricular change. The College of Medicine is committed to ensuring that our evaluation tools show evidence of validity, are of reasonable length, and are useful for individual faculty and for COM medical education quality improvement.

The Evaluation committee, with the approval of the Curriculum Committee, has established the following guidelines in order to elicit the meaningful participation of every student in the evaluation process.

• Every required course/clerkship will be evaluated by students. Students will have a minimum expectation of responses based on the needs of each course or clerkship as defined in the syllabus. Each student is expected to complete at least 75% of all assigned faculty, resident, and small group leader evaluation forms associated with a course/clerkship in each year of enrollment. As part of professional development, there is an expectation of 100% completion of the overall course and clerkship evaluations.
• Every student is expected to respond in a professional manner to each item which they feel qualified to answer.
• Strict confidentiality of responses is assured.  Evaluation data (numerical ratings and student comments) is de-identified. 

Failure to complete course/clerkship evaluations within the established timeframe or repeated failure to respond in a timely and reasonable fashion will be reviewed holistically and my impact a student’s professionalism competency evaluation.