Trusting the Simplicity of the Ultimate Question: A Customer Satisfaction Approach to Student Evaluations of Teaching

Abstract: Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are important because they often serve as the primary basis for assessing faculty teaching, one of two key inputs into promotion and tenure and annual performance reviews. Our research tests a simple customer satisfaction measure from the marketing literature against traditional teaching evaluation questionnaires. We find that Reichheld´s (2003) “Ultimate Question” (UQ) model provides essentially identical results to those obtained from SETs. By not pre-specifying course evaluation questions, the UQ prompts students to describe areas for both process and content improvement. Finally, we describe how electronic content analysis software can use the UQ data to create action-oriented faculty development objectives.

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Authors: Peter Gallo, Cindy Corritore, Chris Wichman, Ann York