The Budapest College of Communication and Business is proud to be today’s largest private college in Hungary with over 7200 students. The student evaluation of teacher performance is becoming a highly valued resource, which has been successfully running for several years.

In the beginning (before 2006) the lecturer evaluations had been conducted via the online questionnaires on ETR, but the response rate of these surveys proved to be rather low. In order to improve this rate a change was made and the college started to use paper surveys, where the incoming data was manually saved and evaluated with the help of an Access database. This, of course, was rather time consuming and highly inconvenient.

Ever since the academic year 2006/2007, these surveys have been conducted with the EvaSys software. In the first year as a pilot, and from 2007/2008 onwards as licensed software with an active support option. The Accreditation and Quality Management Office is responsible for all surveys within the organization.

Conducting surveys is not only an obligation set by higher educational laws, but also a corner stone of the quality control driven strategy of our institution. For this very reason the surveys are conducted across the whole university, which allows us to monitor the quality of all educational facilities and by proxy, all courses and lecturers.

The questionnaires are sent out via email or handed out during the penultimate class, where these get filled out by the students. The completed questionnaires are scanned and processed as a batch at the end of each semester. To give an impression, this process included around 950 courses and 17 000 questionnaires last time. The whole process is done within 5 to 6 days, which includes; data process, basic statistical calculations and reports for each course. These are all automatically done by EvaSys.

The results are further analyzed with the help of EvaSys. The analysis covers various areas, such as faculties, work times and class types, which are then compared to past results. We believe that the feedback given by students is of crucial importance, therefore not only do all lecturers, faculty heads, the HR management and the Dean office receive reports of the surveys (with different levels of detail), but also the students receive a summary of their opinion accompanied by the highest ranked course and lecturer.

In the event of a lecturer receiving low scores after multiple semesters, we would firstly try to identify the cause of the poor feedback and take steps to fixing it, but eventually if these steps prove ineffective it would result in the termination of employment.

Even though the primary objective of EvaSys is to evaluate the lecturers within our organization we regularly use the software to track alumni students’ professional path, evaluate final thesis coaches, conduct freshmen surveys, process internship evaluations and  host one-time only surveys as well.
Based on the experience of the personnel using EvaSys, one of the main advantages of the software is its capability to create and process paper based surveys, which are found to yield higher response rates than those based online. It is also important to mention that EvaSys after processing the questionnaires instantly has a report readily available with results shown in graphs and tables.

During the use of the EvaSys software a number of development issues surfaced, as the software was unable to fulfill all our expectations. We are happy to say that these early teething problems have been solved thanks to our endeavors to improve and to keep improving.
The software offers a number of options and features that are currently not utilized (such as creating and marking exams), but we are planning to expand our use to these areas in the near future.