• General Questions
• Essential Core
• Clinical Core

General Questions

Q. What are the characteristics of effective feedback?

A. Feedback is focused on behavior rather than on the person. It is important that the evaluator refer to what a person does rather than to what s/he thinks the person is. Feedback should be specific rather than general. To be told that a small group facilitator is "dominating" will probably not be as useful as to say that "She was not listening to what the others said, but I felt I had to agree with her since she is an instructor."

Feedback should only be provided to help, not hurt, the person receiving it. It should be directed toward behavior that the receiver can improve. Feedback is destructive when it serves one's own needs, such as venting. 

Feedback is about what or how something is said or done, not why it is done. It is risky to assume that we know why a person says or does something, or what he "really" means, or what she is "really" trying to accomplish. If we are uncertain of the person's motives or intent, this uncertainty itself is feedback and should be revealed. For more examples on providing constructive feedback please review the first year Foundations of Patient Care lecture: COURSE INTRO, MEDICAL INTERVIEW, AND GIVING FEEDBACK. (can we link to this?)

Q. What kinds of questions and ratings scales are used in the UCSF SOM evaluation forms?

A. Evaluations are composed of objective questions with a 5-point response scale and a section for comments. Our instructors and course directors strive to earn ratings of 4 and above on this scale. Any score below 4 is considered an area for improvement. The following is a description of the 5-point scale and how the school interprets each value. While "3 = Good", a  teacher interprets a score of 3 as equivalent to a solid 75 (just above passing) on a 100 point exam. Remember to be honest and thoughtful in your evaluations and to give scores that are appropriate. A rating of "1 = Poor" means that the instructor or course-related item is not conducive to student learning or wellbeing. A rating of "5 = Excellent" means that  the content or instructor quality is the best it can be.

Q.  What is the software used for evaluation purposes?

A.  E*Value is our online evaluation tool. It generates e-mail notifications specific to each student that alert students to pending evaluations. The email message contains a hyperlink that will take you to a list of your current evaluations to be completed. In addition to email notifications, you can access E*Value from http://medstudents.ucsf.edu and through iROCKET. You can log into E*Value with your GALEN account and by entering "UCSF" in the Institution Code field.

Q. Is it possible for an instructor to get the name of a student who completed a specific evaluation?

A. Instructors can never find out who the student is, UNLESS a student chooses to identify her/himself. An example of this occurs when a student writes a confidential comment to a  clerkship director: there is an optional box where the student can choose to identify her/himself by name. The box states clearly that if the student wants to be contacted to discuss the comment, to please list name and phone number. If a student chooses not to list her/his name, then the student name is withheld from confidential comments and not released. Preceptor-student relationships are one-on-one and thus preceptors will usually know who the student evaluator is even though student names are not on the completed  evaluation .

Q. What happens to our evaluations after they are submitted? Do course directors and faculty actually listen to our comments?

A. Yes.  Course and faculty evaluations are taken seriously by educational leadership for ongoing course improvement, as well as by departments for faculty promotion and tenure decisions. As examples: faculty are not asked to return to teach if their low teaching scores do not show improvement; and to ensure optimal learning, course content has been moved to other blocks and other times of the year as a result of student feedback on course evaluations.

The School is committed to addressing the issue of mistreatment of students by residents and faculty.  The Associate Dean for Student Affairs monitors evaluations of residents and attendings who receive low scores ("1" and '2") by students on the two Respect questions ("I was treated with respect by this attending" and "I observed others (students, residents, staff, patients) being treated with respect by this attending".  These low scores are brought to the attention of the departments in order to provide feedback to individual residents and attendings, and to address systems issues.

Q. Students felt reluctant to give honest evaluations for fear of individually directed retaliation.  What systems are in place to ensure that students are not subjected to repercussions from writing constructive comments in evaluations on faculty and residents?

A. Students' fears of repercussions have been heard. That is why the course and clerkship directors and the Office of Educational Technology have developed ways to ensure that students are protected. For starters, faculty cannot see students' names on evaluations. Secondly, for clinical courses, students are offered a "confidential comments" section when evaluating their attendings and residents. These confidential comments are received only by the course directors and are used to communicate those issues that students don't feel comfortable conveying otherwise.  Some clerkships also encourage students to use the concern/praise card feature in E*Value for this function. Students can send an anonymous concern card about an attending, preceptor, or resident which goes directly to the clerkship director. Students might use this option if they were not assigned to evaluate a particular attending or resident.

Q. What is expected of students in terms of evaluations in the Essential Core? How does the assignment of evaluations work in the Essential Core?

A. Students are expected to complete all evaluations assigned to them. Final exam and course scores are released after 70% of the evaluations assigned have been completed. For each course, only 1/3 of the class is assigned to complete the full set of evaluations for the course - overall, lecturers and lab instructors - while all students must evaluate their small groups and facilitators. Students who complete less than 30% of the evaluations assigned to them during a block will be contacted by the Office of Educational Technology and encouraged to complete at least 70% of their evaluations by the end of the subsequent block.

Joseph Crawford, in the Office of Educational Technology, is responsible for monitoring each student's response rate and ensuring that each student meets the minimum 30% requirement. While he can monitor what percentage of evaluations a student has completed, he does not have access to student names associated with evaluations when reviewing this compliance.  If at the end of the second block those students chose not to participate in the evaluation process, the Office of Educational Technology will contact the student's Advisory College Mentor who will strategize with the student about how best to meet this competency of Professionalism.

Q. When we submit evaluations are they sent directly to the instructor and is our anonymity protected?

A. Students names are withheld from all the evaluations they complete.  To implement an extra level of anonymity, students' evaluations are released into the system several days after a student evaluates an instructor. Thus during clinical training, evaluations are set to be "reciprocal" between students and faculty, but the release of student evaluations of faculty occurs only after a delay of several days from the time it is complete. This prevents faculty from submitting a student evaluation and then checking to see if any new evaluations of their performance arrived as a result.

Q. How many students typically evaluate an attending?

A. The number of students who complete an evaluation is clerkship dependent. Each clerkship has rules for how they assign evaluations.

Q. When an attending gets feedback, is it marked as being from a student vs. resident vs. intern vs. sub-I?

A. The evaluation itself does not reveal who the student evaluator is, but the programs for the residency and clerkship are managed separately so faculty receive separate aggregate reports from the residency program and the student program. For example, for faculty to look up evaluations by a student, they would go into the clerkship program on E*Value, whereas to see evaluations by a resident they would go into residency program on E*Value.

Q. Why is it that at some sites students can not see who filled out the evaluations about them?

A. Certain clerkships/sites have it as procedure to not allow students to see which faculty members evaluated them.

Q.  How are student comments made anonymous and reported to residents and attendings?

A. Residents and attendings see all the evaluations completed about them. The students' names are suppressed however, so they don't know which student said what when they view their aggregated comments.

Q. Are student evaluations of residents anonymous?

A. Student evaluations of residents are aggregated and anonymized in the same manner as described above for evaluations of faculty.

If you have any questions regarding School of Medicine evaluations please contact our evaluations help desk at evaluations@ucsf.edu or at (415) 476-2300 during normal business hours