Harvard FAS Course Evaluations

In the FAS, course evaluations are known as “the Q”.

Course evaluations are administered in the final weeks of the fall and spring semesters. All FAS courses with enrollments of 5 or more students are required to be evaluated.

Evaluations are open during the last week of classes and close after the final exam period but before grades are released.  Evaluations are tied into “early grade release”, meaning that students who complete all of their course evaluations will be able to access any submitted grades prior to the official grade release date.  In no circumstance will a student be able to evaluate a course after viewing their final grade in my.harvard.  Similarly, instructional staff cannot view course evaluation results until they have submitted their final grades for the course.

The FAS course evaluation form has a standard set of questions about the course and a standard set of questions about each instructor. Instructional staff are given the opportunity to customize the evaluation form by adding up to 3 questions of their own.

Evaluation results are made available to the instructional staff shortly after the course evaluation close date. A subset of course evaluation results are made available to anyone with a valid HUID. These include:             

• Aggregated summary of all numeric results (distribution, average, and median)
• Verbatim student responses to “What would you like to tell future students about this course?”  

Per FAS policy, evaluation results for instructional staff whose primary role at Harvard is “student” will NOT be made available to the broader HUID community. This applies to instructional staff who are either a current undergraduate or graduate student.

Since spring of 2019, the FAS has used Explorance Blue as its course evaluation platform.