Assessing the Classroom Environment (ACE) is an online evaluation system that collects student opinions about an instructor and provides a standard set of summary results. Instructors may or may not be required to use ACE and should check with their department to determine their options.

Key Features

• Allows for greater access to course evaluations for students and faculty
• Will distribute evaluations for all courses regardless of enrollment (independent studies excluded).
• Flexible configuration and easy distribution
• Instructors can select a set of items from a question bank of approximately 200 evaluative statements
• Instructor-generated items can require either a scaled response or open-ended comments
• Quick access to results and reporting features

Once the course evaluation period has closed, reports are made available for instructor use:

Ratings Summary - summarizes the means from questions used in your evaluation by the instructor's custom questions, bank questions, and core questions. This report includes Instructor median and Department median. See the document below for explanation of how the median is calculated.

Comments Report - summarizes all of the written comments from questions used in your evaluation by instructor's question, bank questions, and core questions.  

Individual Responses Report - allow the instructor to view each individual student evaluation, which includes both Likert scale items and open-ended questions and responses.      

WebOptics - a data visualization tool that allows the graphical representations of statistics.  You can compare your overall course summary to the Department. Types available include bar graphs of overall question ranking, longitudinal line graphs, and heat maps.

For more information, please visit https://teach.uiowa.edu/ace-online-evaluations