Postlecture and postcourse student ratings of faculty in multi‐instructor courses

This study examined ratings of faculty by medical students in six large multi‐instructor courses, each of which directly involved four or more faculty in instruction. Throughout each of the courses, faculty were first rated immediately following their individual lectures by samples of randomly selected students. They were rated again at the end of the courses by nonoverlapping samples of randomly selected students. The immediate (postlecture) ratings and the end‐of‐course (postcourse) ratings produced very similar rank orderings of faculty within courses. The average postcourse ratings, however, were consistently almost one third of a point lower than their more immediate postlecture counterparts. Findings are contrasted with results from previous studies, and implications for gathering, reporting, interpreting, and using faculty ratings from multi‐instructor courses are discussed.