Abstract:

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is most often used as a metric to measure customers’ satisfaction and assess the future growth potential of a business. Introduced in 2003, it is a single question survey item that uses an 11-point scale that asks the customer how likely they are to recommend their company to a friend or colleague. A Net Promoter Score places customers as either promoters, passives, or detractors and the NPS score is based on the net difference between promoters and detractors. However, despite extensive use in various industries, its application in higher education has been limited. The purpose of this presentation is to explore how NPS might be applied to the evaluation of instructor effectiveness and course quality. Most institutions of higher education use student evaluations as a barometer of good teaching. These may be used developmentally to facilitate course and instructor enhancements to teaching. They may also be used in an evaluative manner where department chairs and other administrators, particularly in the United States, place a lot of weight on the end-of-semester assessments, that students anonymously complete about their instructors, as part of annual assessments of teaching effectiveness and for tenure appointments and promotion decisions. With so much riding on these course evaluations the fact is that students often do not complete these evaluations seriously or at all. Students report that they are burdensome and time consuming. Student response rates for voluntary completion of course evaluations are often less than necessary for the information generated to be accurate and useful. The use of the single item NPS may be a way ensure higher student response rates that provide accurate evaluative information on instructor effectiveness and course quality for use in administrative decision-making. In this presentation we review the use of course evaluations in academic settings, the research behind the use of NPS, and the introduction to adopting the NPS to instructor and course evaluations to measure student satisfaction.

Keywords:

Net Promoter Score, Likelihood to Recommend, Student Satisfaction, Course Evaluation.