These days, many students don’t go to class or use institutional resources. Like, at all.
Requiring these students to complete your course evaluation will only generate meaningless feedback for you - and waste their time. Let them opt out.
BE SURE STUDENTS CAN ANSWER THE QUESTIONS YOU’RE ASKING.
Students are well-positioned to comment upon, say, the instructor’s enthusiasm.
But they don’t know whether the concepts that were taught were the ones that *should* be taught.
You need to evaluate that another way.
MAKE SURE A SURVEY IS THE BEST WAY TO COLLECT DATA.
Surveys are great for evaluating learner sentiment. Just don’t measure quantities with surveys that could be measured directly.
(e.g., instead of asking whether students accessed resources, just count the page clicks)
KNOW WHAT YOU’LL DO WITH THE RESPONSES.
Think of the survey item as a diagnostic test. You should have a distinct idea about what you’ll do if the feedback says one thing or another.
And if you aren’t gonna change anything, regardless of the sentiment expressed - don’t ask.
*** - I can’t stress this last point enough. If you ask students, course after course, what they think should be done to improve a course, but in reality, you have no intention of doing what they’re gonna suggest - it breeds mistrust and discontent to keep asking them.
MAKE SURE THE SURVEY ITEMS ARE CLEAN.
If you’re using loaded words, confusing stems, or double-barreled items, you won’t accurately measure your learners’ sentiment.
RESIST THE TEMPTATION TO “OBJECTIVELY” COMPARE COURSES.
Unless you have control over all the confounding variables, it’s likely not meaningful to compare Course A’s Likert score of 3.72 to Course B’s Likert of 3.51.
(Heck, those figures may not even be statistically different).
Same thing goes for longitudinal comparisons of the same course.
Maybe this year’s class gave you a higher 5-point Likert score than last year’s… but there are probably many differences between those classes beyond the instruction they received in your course.
ANCHOR LIKERT SCALES WITH REALITY.
A 5-point scale is much more meaningful everyone’s on the same page about what the numbers mean. Anchor the numbers with a description of what a rating at that number *should* look like in real terms.
MAKE THE SURVEY AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE.
Then make it shorter.
Ask yourself how much time YOU would want to spend on a survey with no reward.
(Plus, you’d probably rather have meaningful responses to 5 questions than rushed responses to 25.)
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Hang around #MedTwitter for a while, and you’ll find someone claiming that there aren’t enough residency positions for U.S. medical students, or that residency positions aren’t growing at the same rate as medical school graduates.
Trouble is, neither is true.
(a 🧵)
FACT:
In 2022, there were 19,902 graduating MDs and 7,303 graduating DOs who submitted a rank order list in the NRMP Match.
That’s 27,205 graduating medical students.
There were 36,277 PGY-1 positions offered.
That’s *1.33* PGY-1 positions available for every U.S. graduate.
However:
When you consider IMGs and repeat applicants, there are only 0.85 positions/applicant.
In other words, there are more than enough residency positions for all US graduates… but not enough for every applicant in the world.
The average number of applications submitted by applicants is up, too.
Here are the current averages for each specialty (considering all applicant types - MDs, DOs, and IMGs).
MD applicants in dermatology, otolaryngology, urology, and neurosurgery now submit a mean of around 80 applications or more - and the average MD applicant in orthopedics submits nearly 100 applications.
It’s one thing for an insurer to DENY a claim. But why do so many insurers expend such effort to DELAY payment, even for justified claims they know they have to pay?
If you didn’t know already, let me teach you about “float.”
Look, even before the Step 2 CS cancellation, my DMs and email were flooded with messages from osteopathic medical students who are fed up with the NBOME.
There is *real* anger toward this organization. Honestly, more than I even heard about from MD students and the NBME.
The question is, will that sentiment translate into action?
Amorphous anger on social media is easy to ignore. But if that anger gets channeled into organized efforts to facilitate change, then improvements are possible.