Towards the end of each semester, you'll be invited to evaluate your course, teacher and tutor via an online Student Evaluation of Course and Teacher (SECaT) or Student Evaluation of Tutor (SETutor).

Evaluations are voluntary, confidential, and take only 3-5 minutes to complete. You can choose to opt out of individual surveys and you can evaluate only the staff who have taught you. 

Begin SECaT or SETutor evaluation

Your feedback helps us to continually improve courses and teaching. Watch the video to learn more.

Your comments

Feedback provided through student evaluations should be constructive. Explain your perceptions of the course, teaching and tutoring strengths and weaknesses, with suggestions for improvements. We suggest you comment on aspects of course, teaching and tutoring quality, such as content, resources, assessments, teaching and learning strategies, or organisation. 

Comments should be professionally communicated – that is, avoid using expletives or urban slang. Please also avoid comments of a personal nature that are not relevant to course, teaching and tutoring quality. 

When completing evaluations, you're required to comply with the Student Integrity and Misconduct policy, which outlines acceptable and inappropriate student behaviour. Offensive or inappropriate comments will be removed.

Grievances

Evaluations are not the mechanism for lodging grievances. Refer to the Student Grievance Resolution policy if you have a grievance about academic or teaching standards.

Confidentiality

From Semester 1, 2015 all SECaTs are designed to be confidential in order for the University to comply with its legal obligations in regard to Privacy (Queensland Information Privacy Act 2009) and Duty of Care (Queensland Work Health and Safety Act 2011). Beginning from Semester 2, 2018 onwards, SETutor surveys are also conducted as confidential surveys.

Your responses to student evaluations are confidential, in that individually identifiable data are not made available to academic staff. By agreeing to complete your evaluations, you agree to provide constructive feedback (positive or negative), which is intended to help improve the quality of teaching and learning at UQ. In doing so, you are also aware of your obligations as a UQ student.  

Student evaluations assure student confidentiality in relation to the general reporting of SECaT and SETutor outcomes to University staff (academics, professional staff within faculties and schools or other units, and divisions outside of the UQ Evaluation Unit and University Senior Executives). Student confidentiality is further increased for these reporting processes through the reporting rules:

  • no SECaT will be generated if a course has fewer than 6 students enrolled
  • no quantitative data will be released if a course has fewer than 6 responses
  • no SETutor will be generated if a tutorial has fewer than 5 students enrolled
  • no quantitative data will be released if a SETutor survey has fewer than 5 responses.

The University keeps a record of student information related to the completion of student evaluations. This information includes a record of student identification numbers against survey responses. The collection of student identification numbers allows the University to comply with its legal obligations.

The University will access student information related to student responses when required by law, and if a response is identified by UQ staff to be in breach of the University’s Student Integrity and Misconduct policy or duty of care responsibilities to students and staff. This includes responses which:

  • threaten students or staff in any way by harassing, vilifying, bullying, abusing, threatening, assaulting or endangering staff, students or other members of the University's community directly or by other means of communication (3.60.04 Student Integrity and Misconduct, subsection 6.2.2 [h]), or
  • are deemed by relevant University staff to be inappropriate because they contain profanities or other statements not provided with constructive intent for improvements to teaching and learning provisions at the University.

Student identification information in these instances will only be accessed in order to unpublish comments, manage allegations made in comments, and archive them for legal purposes. Academic staff will not receive individually identifiable student information unless the University is required to provide this information for legal compliance.

See the Course and Teacher Surveys policy for more information.

Survey results

Results are primarily used for quality assurance purposes. Your feedback informs our understanding of teaching strengths and weaknesses and provides ideas about how courses and teaching can be improved.

Survey results are also used for recruitment, continuing employment and promotion, and for decisions about courses, programs, and the student experience. Survey results are not released to staff until after the finalisation of grades date each semester.

You can view survey results on the UQ Union website.

View results for your courses

Non-identifiable data collected from the UQ course and teaching survey instruments may be made available to staff for research purposes under Section 5.1 of the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (PDF, 603KB).