Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES) offers a fully hosted online course evaluation and survey system designed to streamline the entire student feedback process for our campus. These directions are for Course Evaluations and Surveys Admins (departmental secretaries, chairs, and deans) to manage CES Projects.

In CES, Surveys refer to the evaluation questions. Projects refer to the semester course evaluation deployments (Response Periods in Blackboard Enterprise Surveys). The Main surveys will be created by the Institutional Effectiveness and Planning Office who will also import all of the semester courses into the project and set the deployment dates and email settings for the students and instructors.  

Target Surveys are School, Department or Program-level surveys that can be deployed to ALL courses of a hierarchy level, i.e., SNSS, or with a specific course code(s), i.e., PSY.  Approved Target Surveys will also be deployed automatically by Institutional Effectiveness and Planning each semester. 

A prior service request to set up or change an existing Target Survey must be made a minimum of one month prior to the actual deployment date. Service requests can be made much earlier (recommended). Service requests for changes, general questions, and support can be made at the Information Technology (IT) Self-Service Portal by a departmental representative (or by a dean for the whole school).

Generating Mean Score Reports

Accessing CES

• Login via Blackboard: https://buffalostate.open.suny.edu (or find a link under “Toolbox” on the MYBUFFSTATE page).
• Locate the CES module on the Blackboard landing page. 

Default Course Evaluation Reports display question mean scores, but not overall means. This is because course evaluations include multiple surveys, i.e., College-level (Main), School-level (Target), and Department-level (Target or Custom), and these surveys may include disparate scales. To generate mean scores for only one of these surveys or set of questions: 

1. Select “Report Builder 2.0” from the “Results” dropdown. 
2. Select the “Courses” tab. 

*All three of the following filters must be completed: 

Course

1. Enter Course Code, then “Search.” (Or, search by the CRN in “Course UniqueID” which is in the format: 202030-HTR300-1143.) 
   
   
2. Select your course (or more than one course), then “Apply.” 

Questions 

1. Select “Targeted Survey” or “Custom Survey” in the middle dropdown (#1 in image), then “Search.” Generally, School-level surveys are Target and Department-level surveys are Custom, but there are some exceptions. 

*To be sure all questions are shown on the page, use the right dropdown (#2 in image) to increase the number of questions shown. 

*To select all questions on the page, click “Select Page” at the bottom of the window (#3 in image). 

Grouping Field 

1. Select “Course/Instructor,” THEN CLICK “RUN” (in the upper, left corner). 
   
   

Depending on the size of the report generated, you may receive a notification that you will receive an email when the report is completed. This email will contain a link to the report. Or you can navigate back to the “My Reports” tab within Report Builder 2.0: 

Once your report is generated, select “Aggregated Results” to see the total means. You can use the Excel or PDF link to print out a report. 

This report will show results by the question, but also an aggregated TOTAL mean by course at the end – look for “Aggregated Results.”