Legal Basis
Excerpts from the evaluation guidelines of Freie Universität Berlin:
- All members of Freie Universität Berlin are required to participate in evaluations. (Section 1)
- Evaluations serve the purposes of internal assessment and further development of the quality of the university’s education programs and modes of instruction, the promotion of quality awareness and constructive dialogue within the university, and internal and external accountability. (Section 2)
- Course evaluations are carried out on a regular basis at Freie Universität Berlin. The purpose of course evaluations is to provide teaching staff with specific feedback on individual courses from the students’ perspective. (Section 8)
- The dean’s office and committees, where applicable, receive anonymized results of the course evaluations from a given semester. These evaluations shall not be used to enforce personnel measures with negative effect. (Section 10)
- The students of a department or central institute shall be informed of key measures relating to quality development based on evaluation results. This may include aggregated or anonymized general results. (Section 10)
- Instructors [...] are required to participate in the implementation of the measures derived from the evaluations. (Section 1)
- All persons involved in the implementation of evaluation procedures are required to comply with data protection regulations, in particular with the Berlin Higher Education Act (BerlHG) and Berlin’s Data Protection Act (BlnDSG). (Section 11)
- Generally speaking, the integral courses of a department or central institute are to be evaluated every two years. The departments or central institutes decide which specific courses are to be evaluated over the course of each semester and how a fair distribution between individual instructors or types of courses is to be established. (Section 9)
- For academic staff who are teaching for the first time, as well as for first-time university instructors, the course evaluation shall be carried out using the questionnaire for assessing teaching competence (LeKo) – primarily in the first year of teaching. (Section 9) – further information for first-time instructors