Student questionnaire — Can we trust it?

At the end of each semester, students of our faculty are asked to complete the official Student Questionnaire. They can there evaluate all courses they were enrolled in as well as all teachers and lecturers who led or tutored these courses. Since the results gained from this questionnaire are used to improve the quality of courses and teachers as well, it is important to know how reliable the student evaluations are. With the aim to verify the outcomes of student evaluation of teaching at our faculty, we prepared our own survey which apart from others contained also the same questions as the official Student Questionnaire. This survey was conducted at one of our courses. In this paper we compare the outcomes of our questionnaire with the official one. The discussion about the differences as well as the rationale for our results reliability is also included.