Faculty of Humanities
School of Environment, Education and Development
Please use this form to respond to the course unit evaluation data for your course unit.
The responses to the evaluation data will be made available to students through Programme
Committee meetings and on the student intranet, and will also be used in responding to the
Faculty, should this be required.
Academic Year:
Semester:
Course Unit Code:
Course Unit Title:
Lecturer(s):
2014-15
1
GEOG12011
Tutorials and Book Review 2014-15
William Kutz (convenor) with: Abi Stone, Alison Browne, Angela
Harris, Anna Gilchrist, Christine Lane, Claire Goulsbra, Emma
Shuttleworth, Federico Cugurullo, Gareth Clay, Helen Wilson,
Jamie Doucette, Jason Dortch, Jennifer O'brien, Laura Edwards,
Maria Kaika, Mark Jayne, Martin Dodge, Philip Hughes, Ross
Jones, Sarah Lindley, William Fletcher
% of evaluations
completed:
Positive points from
the evaluations:
46.07%
Criticisms raised:
How you will
address the
evaluations:
Overall, the student evaluations were remarkably high, and
exceeded the school means in all areas but one. The student
satisfaction was high, with very positive comments on the
teaching standards and the quality of learning experience.
Several highlights include:
 Overall excellence of the course: 4.24/5
 Helpfulness of feedback: 4.63/5
 Assessment methods were clearly explained: 4.67/5
 Instructor enthusiasm: 4.58/5
I think this is an outstanding achievement given the administrative
challenges encountered during the semester. It speaks to the
collective quality of the instructors, their feedback and
engagement with the students. This is something the department
should be very proud to have accomplished.
The students raised a few key issues:
 Some of the feedback on the essays needed to be more
specific in terms of how the content deficiencies mapped
onto the actual marks given;
 Some book review presentations received wildly different
marks between their initial, practice presentations and the
their actual graded presentations;
 Some of the students (and this is evidenced by Q7 ‘the
course was intellectually stimulating’) felt that the course
unit could have been more challenging.
In terms of the first issue, the simple answer is that staff should be
encouraged to make sure that the comments given on the essays
are more effective in employing the language of the grading
rubric. This will ensure students see clearly how specific problems
translate into the marks they received.
Second, in the future, I do not think that a practice session with
GTA should be allowed. Although I said that GTAs should not
mark the practice sessions, a small number of students were
given the impression that their presentations were better than
they were and expected a higher mark. When a second GTA
marked the presentations lower, they insisted that they deserved
better. All of this could have been avoided if GTAs were simply
kept out of these practice sessions and given one mark alone.
Third, I think that in the future the content of the tutorials could
benefit from more hands on writing activities, more in-class
discussion and constructive criticism of each-others work to allow
students to learn from each other, and more activities for students
to develop clearer, more logical forms of argument.
PLEASE RETURN FORM BY EMAIL TO: daniel.chung@manchester.ac.uk