Abstract

Course evaluations are one of the tools that a university and its faculty may use to gather information about students’ attitudes toward the quality of the courses they offer. The present study focused on an often neglected factor of course evaluations. Namely, their potential sensitivity to the temporal context in which they occur. Thus, we asked whether students’ response rates in course evaluations and resulting ratings have changed across three time intervals: before, during, and after the pandemic. The study examined the responses of an understudied population of female college students from Saudi Arabia. The country’s gender-equity alignment, which had been guided by efforts to restructure the economy of the country, took a temporary respite during the pandemic, thereby making female students’ responses a potential indicator of their sense of agency over time. After finding consistent declines in participation from the pre-pandemic period, but no change in ratings, we questioned whether course evaluations were sensitive and valid measures of changes in students’ opinions about their learning in an academic setting. Informal queries indicated that students did not often see the utility of course evaluations, explaining their modest response rates, and used them to express polarized feelings, suggesting that students with moderate attitudes might elude participation. As such, course evaluations were deemed poor measures of participants’ sense of agency.