Evaluation Process & Policies: Using BLUE

Printable DIG Quick Reference Guide

The Evaluation Process

1. Department Key Contacts Review of Courses, Forms, and Date Ranges

  • Receive email invitations to review courses in the BLUE Data Integrity Gateway (review training materials here).
  • Confirm and submit any changes by the due date specified in the invitation.
  • If any changes to the instructors of record are made after the start of the semester, please enact this change in CourseLeaf and inform OADS so that changes can be mirrored within the BLUE system.
    • Depending on the School or Department, it is encouraged for Graduate Teaching Assistants also be listed in CourseLeaf to receive evaluations. All individuals affiliated with a course section in CourseLeaf will be piped into the evaluation questionnaire.

2. Faculty Review and Add Custom Questions

  • In the third week of each semester, instructors receive an invitation to view their default course settings in Blue. This communicates the proposed survey window and enrolled student list so instructors may plan to use 15 minutes of a class period for completing surveys well in advance.
    • At this time, instructors may reach out to eval-admin@georgetown.edu if they’d like to change the survey dates.
  • Fifteen days before evaluations are scheduled to open, instructors will be invited to customize their questionnaires with up to 5 additional questions. Personalized question additions may be selected from a pre-fabricated question bank or designed from scratch.

3. Students Receive Evaluation Invitations

  • Once the survey becomes available, the students will receive email reminders listing the courses for which they still have pending evaluations. These emails will contain a link to the BLUE website, where students can log-in using their NetID and password.
  • Per Main Campus Executive Faculty recommendation, please reserve 15 minutes of in-class time for students to complete surveys during a class session. Please remind students that they will need to use a laptop, tablet, smartphone, or other mobile device during class on that date in order to access the survey.

4. Evaluation Periods Closes & Faculty Submit Grades

  • The evaluation survey will close before final exams begin and before grades for the semester become available to students.
  • Faculty do not receive any evaluation results until after all grades have been submitted for each course.

5. Evaluation Report Made Available

  • The online evaluations are completely anonymous. Instructors, departments/programs and Deans can see feedback in an aggregated form or as individual response sets, but the responses are never attributed to specific students. Instructors, departments/programs and Deans will not be able to determine which students completed evaluations and which students did not.
  • Faculty never receive any information about which students submitted which responses. Also, faculty will not be able to determine who completed their evaluations and who did not.
  • The results of some questions are published online in the schedule of classes available to students through MyAccess. Faculty have the ability to opt out of having their results published there.

Additional Considerations

OADS does not evaluate the following types of sections:

  • Sections with only three or less students enrolled
  • Internships, labs, recitations, or independent studies
  • Courses taught in certain departments, such as ENFL, ATHL, DEVM, ECIL, SABR, UROP
  • Courses with the following course numbers: 999, 997, 992, 991, 902, 901, 302, 301
  • Courses with the following sections numbers: 60-69
  • Courses ending outside the standard course end date for the semester unless notified
  • Teaching assistants

It may be possible to open evaluations for recitations or labs, but not for courses with fewer than four students. To have such courses included for evaluation, faculty and department administrators must contact OADS at eval-admin@georgetown.edu at the beginning of each semester.