Thousands of former post-secondary students speak out—are you listening?
BC College and Institute Student Outcomes (CISO) April 2006 update printed in its entirety (below) .
For those of you with students in grade 10-12 or students looking to transfer between post-secondary institutions now you can research your program through this online querying tool. To search for information select an institution or a program. Information on the last three years of student survey results are available for the following aspects:
- Gender, main reason for enrolling, graduation status, previous education;
- Employment status, salary, job status, relationship of job to program, usefulness of program in getting job, and usefulness & skills gained in program in performing job;
- Current activity, further studies, detail skills development & College experience;
- Student rating of: personal development & education aspects of the program & courses;
- Overall satisfaction, satisfaction with education, & program workload; and
- Job search experience, jobs obtained by National Occupation Classification (NOC).
There are also many publications available on this web site that are worth a gander through.
Thousands of former students speak out—are you listening?
What do former post-secondary students say about the institutions they attended? How do they feel about their programs of study? Were they satisfied? How many found jobs? How many went back to school? The BC College and Institute Student Outcomes (CISO) Project has designed an online reporting system that will answer these questions and many more!
The reporting system is designed for students, prospective students, parents, and education and career counsellors. It gives users fast and easy access to a wealth of outcomes information collected from BC’s former college, university college, and institute students.
Start your search today at http://outcomes.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/SORS/index.asp.
posted by Simone @ 10:52 a.m.
2 comments
2 Comments:
I checked out the student outcomes reporting system and found it to be somewhat awkward to use (they should have used drop-down lists instead of pop-up forms). The site provides a good high-level overview. But, the information presented can be difficult to interpret. In particular, it is impossible to resolve any relationship information between displayed results. For example: one cannot determine if program satisfaction is related to employment status or to reasons for attending.
Somewhat related to the above, valuable insight into specific instructors can be gleaned from the following websites:
http://www.ratemyteachers.com/ for K-12 teachers and
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ for university/college instructors.
The comments left on these sites are anonymous and must be taken with a grain of salt; however, based on my family's observations, they have proven to be accurate more often then not and they have helped prepare us for some of the teachers’ idiosyncrasies.
I agree, the interface is awkward to use and I expect it will be changed to be more user friendly. The important aspect of this online tool is that it contains information that was previously not available to the public.
As you indicated there are many limitations to this tool, among them, the tool does not allow you to drill down and fine tune the results. I would also like to point out that unemployment rates can be misleading indicators if you are comparing institutions as the unemployment rate of each region differs and may influence the student employment outcomes for students who end up working in that region.
The RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com websites are good source of anecdotal information. I treat this information the same way I treat a rumour that requires further evidence to corroborate or debunk. Here again, it is important to keep in mind that ratings for teachers teaching subjects that are required for graduation (or mandatory in first and second year courses) may, in general, be lower (and the comments harsher) than the ratings and comments for subjects that are electives. The other aspect that does not do justice to the teachers is that the comments and ratings are up there indefinitely which means that a new teacher, who is still learning may be unfairly judged in perpetuity even if the student’s comments at that time were well deserved.
The BC College of teachers and school districts do not provide a method for parents and students to provide feedback to teachers (other than through a complaint process), in other words, there is no process to ensure improvements in teaching practices. If you are thinking that the parent teacher interview is an effective means to provide feedback to a teacher, think again; here you are a parent and a student at the mercy of the teacher’s goodwill for the duration of the course. While the general criticism that survey methodology on these websites is non-existent is a valid one, the argument that anonymous website feedback makes the information worthless is, in my view, weak. Most survey results are anonymous and, in the case of RateMyTeachers.com, it is easy to pick out the angry outbursts and student infatuation notes from other more legitimate feedback. And, because the BC teaching profession is self regulated, this means nothing to a parent or student and, ultimately, this is why these websites exists.
I would not use any of the sources of information above in isolation. In addition to the above references, talk to other parents with children who are more senior than your children. For post-secondary programs visit, call, attend open-houses, field trips, or write to the program coordinators and deans and ask them to provide you with what you need.
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