Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES) by Watermark 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).

Viewing Course Evaluation Results

Accessing CES

From the MYBUFFSTATE: Faculty & Staff page, click on the "Watermark" link in the TOOLBOX.

View Project Results: by Instructor or Course Section

• You will be taken to the Course Evaluations and Surveys Dashboard. Make sure the role (see below) displays the correct one. There may be an option for Instructor or Student/Respondent.

• Response Rate Tracker  will display live data of the response rates for your courses. Click on the link to view a more detailed list.
• Under Project Results (see above), click the link for the course evaluation project that you would like to view. 
  • Note: Results may not be viewable and restricted until grades have closed.
  • If you do not see the results for a particular semester, your department may have used Blackboard Enterprise Surveys.

• Select the “By Instructor” or “Course Section” tab and click the download icon next to your course. (Reports by Hierarchy Level are described after this section.)

• Select an option for the report. PDF + Comments is the most commonly used option. You will see a message "Report Generating" and then the PDF report will open.

• Raw Data downloads the results so that they can be imported into another program.
• Feedback allows the instructor and/or chair/dean to provide feedback that can be viewable and emailed.
• Note: reports will not be generated, to ensure anonymity, for courses where respondents did not meet a minimum threshold (currently less than 3 respondents). Contact your departmental admin to view an aggregated report of courses that do not meet the minimum threshold. They can create a combined report. 

There is the option to merge and aggregate the results into a combined report or to download multiple individual reports in one file.

• Select multiple courses and click the “Batch Report” option:

A Batch Report window will pop-up.  Name the report and select the  Report Type that you would like generated and click Go. 

• “Download Multiple Reports” will save individual course reports in a zipped file.
• “Merge Multiple Reports” will display a report with all of the individual courses on one PDF.
• “Aggregate Data” will display a summary report of all courses in one pdf.

You will receive an email when the Batch Report is available.

You can also use the shortcuts in the Results header label. The drop-down menu has options for Response Rate Tracker, Project Results, Instructor Results, Report Builder, Results Feedback.

*Reports Builder 2.0 will present the same menus as above.

View Project Results: by Hierarchy Level

• Select the “By Hierarchy Level” tab after clicking on your project.

• Click inside the drop-down under “Hierarchy Level” to view the areas under your purview. Click the area for which you want the report.

• Select an option for the report. Report + Comments is the most commonly used option. You will see a message "Report Generating" and then the PDF report will open.

• Raw Data downloads the results so that they can be imported into another program.
• Feedback allows the instructor and/or chair/dean to provide feedback that can be viewable and emailed.
• Note: reports will not be generated, to ensure anonymity, for courses where respondents did not meet a minimum threshold (currently less than 3 respondents). Contact your departmental admin to view an aggregated report of courses that do not meet the minimum threshold. They can create a combined report. 

If you have any issues, please submit a ticket through the Electronic Course Evaluations (Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys, formerly EvaluationKIT) service.