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A.M.: Faculty Evaluations After the Mainframe
By
Patrick McLeod, Research and Statistical Support Services
Consultant
As
documented
in
the pages of past Benchmarks issues, the academic and
administrative mainframes are now completely decommissioned. One of
the many tried and true services that the mainframe produced for the
UNT academic community was faculty and instructor evaluation reports.
Academic Computing Services management, Data
Management staff, and Research and Statistical Support staff have
collaborated on a project to replace the mainframe-based faculty and
instructor evaluations with a desktop-based reporting system using
SAS. The new SAS-generated faculty and instructor evaluations
continue to provide all the reporting structure of the mainframe-based
evaluations while integrating the computational power and flexible
syntax of SAS with reports saved in
Rich Text Format files that are easily imported into Microsoft
Word.
Mainframe-based evaluations were produced within
the infrastructure of mainframe computing at UNT: Desktop clients to
log in to the mainframe, code that ran on the mainframe and printouts
that were produced on the printer formerly located in the I/O Area in
the ISB. Since all of this infrastructure save for the desktop login
clients are now either decommissioned (the mainframe) or no longer
standing (the printer), the new desktop-based solution takes advantage
of SAS’ capability to export output to Rich Text and to
Comma Separated Values files (as with RTF files and MS-Word, CSV
files are easily imported into MS-Excel) to deliver the reports on a
floppy disk to the requesting departments.
New Look, Same Information
The new faculty and instructor evaluations make
use of SAS’ data step, PROC SUMMARY and PROC FREQ to analyze response
data and generate output. Click here for an
example of the PROC FREQ output sorted by Instructor, Course and
Section.
This piece of output is generated as part of a
larger Rich Text file of all the output for each department’s
evaluations. This output is easily imported into MS-Word where it can
be re-sized and page breaks can be added for printing out reports to
provide to each instructor. This piece of output provides the
frequency of answers to questions in a cross-tabulation table sorted
by Instructor, Course and Section. A second piece of output generated
using PROC SUMMARY provides mean and standard deviation scores for
aggregated questions (overall means and standard deviations and
aggregated means and standard deviations for specific groups if output
is requested in parts instead of one overall analysis); this example
here, once more, is sorted by Instructor,
Course and Section.
These two pieces of output offer the same
information that the mainframe output offered in a slightly different
format. Just like the mainframe output, this output can be generated
by any number of categories: Overall (no breakdown), by instructor
name, by instructor number, by instructor and course, by course only,
by instructor, course and section and by instructor within course. If
there is a way to logically divide your data, SAS can be prompted to
analyze your data based on this divide and to generate output from it.
More information returned
In order to provide the departments and schools
with more information, the faculty and instructor evaluations will be
returned in electronic format on floppy disks. Each of these disks
will have one raw data file (the data that the optical reader scans
from the department and school Scantrons), one or more .CSV files
(depending on what types of analysis are requested and how many parts
they are broken down into) and one or more .RTF files of output.
Departments and schools can then import the .RTF file(s) into
Microsoft Word to insert comments, format the output with page breaks
and to store the information locally for future reference.
We hope that this new system of faculty and
instructor evaluations will continue to provide the expected level of
performance that the mainframe-based evaluations provided in the past;
in addition, we hope that the enhancements to this process will make
usage, distribution and storage easier for all the departments and
schools that Academic Computing Services serves across the entire UNT
system.
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