The Office of University Assessment under the University Registrar manages course evaluation processes for the following schools and academic programs:

  • The Divinity School
  • The Graduate School
  • School of Law
  • Nicholas School of the Environment
  • Office of Biomedical Graduate Education Programs
  • Pratt School of Engineering Professional Programs
  • Sanford School of Public Policy
  • Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Course evaluation policies, schedules, and questionnaires may vary across schools. These pages include general process details and instructions that are applicable to all schools, unless otherwise noted.

Cross-listed Courses

At the school level, schools may define what course types or components should be included into Watermark. For example, a school may opt to not include Independent Studies in the course evaluation process. School-level administrators and department-level administrators will have the opportunity to remove any additional courses during the course review process within Watermark.

Paired courses

OUR recognizes that some courses are not formally cross-listed in DukeHub, but they are paired where students sit in the same classroom, with the same instructor, at the same time. Given that paired courses are separate courses with no official link, there is no way to connect them for course evaluations. Any paired courses will remain independent and imported to their respective projects within Watermark.

Permanent cross-listed courses

Courses that are officially cross-listed at the course level and included in the course catalog as such will be consolidated into a single course entry in Watermark based on their combined section ID. Course owners in Watermark will match course owners in DukeHub. Departments must undergo the course request process to change ownership. Course ownership will dictate which questionnaire is given to all students in all cross-listed departments in cases where the cross-listed departments are in schools with different questionnaires—all students will receive the owner’s questionnaire only. Course ownership will also dictate which academic unit will be able to see and edit the course during the course review window and departmental custom questions window. All cross-listed departments will see the course evaluation results.

Special topics courses

Crosslists among special topics courses—including first-year seminars—may have multiple owners in the course catalog; however, ownership in Watermark will reflect the owner in DukeHub, determined by its scheduler for a specific offering. The department that scheduled the class in CourseLeaf (CLSS) will be the owner in Watermark.

Courses with low enrollment

All courses as queried by school are included in the course evaluation process regardless of enrollment size. To protect respondent confidentiality, results will only be viewable to instructors if there are more than 5 students enrolled. Departments and school-level administrators will have access to all results and may share low enrollment results with instructors at their discretion.

Instructors and TAs

All courses must have an instructor assigned prior to their import into Watermark to be included in the course evaluation process. Watermark uses Shibboleth authentication, so all instructors must have a Duke netID to be included in the course evaluation process.

Instructors and TA information will be populated by DukeHub information at the time of import. School-level administrators and department-level administrators will have the opportunity to alter instructor and TA information during the course review window. Changes may be made course by course. Or a school or department-level administrator can do for their project.

Please be on the lookout for future information and action items about course evaluations. See our calendar for more information about the timeline.

Updated February 2024