Course Evaluations - Frequently Asked Questions

Course evaluations open to students during the last two weeks of the semester prior to exams. They close before exams begin.

For specific dates for this semester's course evaluations, please see the Assessment Calendar.

Instructors and Administrators are able to see completed course evaluations after grades are submitted.

For specific dates for this semester's course evaluations, please see the Assessment Calendar.

Instructors can access their Course Evaluation system and see results through the Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES) as a part of the Watermark products suite, which uses your Howard SSO. This system is integrated into Faculty Success. You will automatically gain access to Course Evaluations once you have been listed as a course instructor.

Course Evaluations & Surveys (CES) populate through the course information entered in BisonHub and Canvas. If there is an error regarding instructor-course alignment in CES, the original issue stems from one of two places:

1) BisonHub. The wrong instructor is assigned to the course in the schedule of classes, which is based off of the information provided to the Registrar.
2) Canvas. The wrong instructor is assigned the role of Teacher on the Canvas page for the course.

NOTE: Beginning in Fall 2024, Courses will be entered in CourseDog by departmental chairs. 

To fix this problem in CES, you can approach it one of two ways:

1) In Canvas, ensure that only the instructor is assigned the role of Teacher. The courses in Canvas are synched to CES prior to deployment so this is one way to fix the issue.

2) In CES, administrators can use the Manage Courses function. This allows administrators to enroll/unenroll instructors to courses.

• Click the “Manage Courses” function in the top navigation menu or on the right-hand side widget. You will be able to see all the projects that allow you to enroll/unenroll instructors.
• Click on the project and navigate to the course in question. Click on the + button under enrollment to enroll an instructor. Click on the number under ‘Instructor' and select the check boxes next to the names of instructors you would like to remove to unenroll any instructors.
• Linked here is a video tutorial on this process. Note that not all of the features demonstrated in this video have been enabled by our Team.
• Any course instructors must have @howard.edu email addresses.

*Any instructors looking to enroll/unenroll Teaching Assistants can apply the same set of instructions to do so. Please be mindful that the only difference to enroll/unenroll TAs is that the Canvas designated role in question is TA and the CES title is 'TA'.

Our recommendation is to go ahead and complete the evaluation as is. As long as it is the correct course (subject code, course code, and section), the evaluation will be correctly aligned with the course and can be retroactively provided to the correct instructor. Sometimes situations like this occur due to administrative errors within the department.

If you'd like to, you can include the name of your instructor in the comments section of the evaluation. 

Students will receive an email instructing them when Course Evaluations are open and additional reminders via email to complete course evaluations. They can either access course evaluations through the email link or through the module that appears on the Canvas pages for each course. 

Faculty Success applications cannot be evaluated without Course Evaluations. 

All reappointment applications have auto-generated reports (CV and Activity Report). These reports are generated based on the information entered into the Activity section of Faculty Success. 

To ensure that the data included for your submission is current, the recommendation is to refresh these reports. This can be done by selecting the “Refresh Report” button next to each individual report, or by using the “Refresh All” button at the top of the application. Once reports are refreshed, click to open the PDF file and check for accuracy of information.

If course evaluations are not included in the Activity Report, please go to the Watermark apps button (generally located in the top right corner of the website). Click on the circular icon to view the available Watermark applications. Faculty and instructors can access their past evaluations (2020-present) on Watermark's Course Evaluations & Surveys (CES). You can build a report by following the instructions linked here. 

Once the Course Evaluations are downloaded from the Course Evaluations and Surveys portal, upload the documents under the “Additional Supporting Documentation" section.

If you are experiencing issues accessing CES, or to access prior course evaluations, please contact assessment@howard.edu.

Please email us at assessment@howard.edu with further questions.