Office of
the Registrar
Accessing Course Evaluations through WebReports
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Individual instructors must use ISIS to access their own course evaluations.
Department Chairs and their administrative assistants use WebReports to access the valid
course evaluations for courses taught by others in the departments/programs they
administer.
WebReports is not the same tool as Report2Web, the tool through which we retrieve budget
and expenditure reports.
A note about timing: the previous semester’s course evaluations are usually made available
through ISIS and WebReports at the same moment in early January/late May, the day after
final grades are due to the Registrar. However, Chairs should note that they may not share the
evaluations with others until at least ten days later. This ten-day period gives faculty their
legislated period to complete the following elective actions:
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any faculty member may add comments to the evaluation file for his/her course, and
first-semester tenure-track faculty or any instructor whose course was evaluated by
fewer than 50% of its students may elect to make “valid” their evaluations which would
otherwise be considered “invalid”.
o “Invalid” evaluations are suppressed from view by anyone but the course
instructor, unless s/he elects to make them “valid” during the 10-day period. Not
even the department Chair or Dean of Faculty, etc. will see “invalid” evaluations.
You will, therefore, want to wait until the end of the 10-day period before completing a
full review of the evaluations for the previous semester.
Reminder: Course evaluations are highly confidential. Departments vary in their internal
agreements about if and how evaluation content is accessible to anyone within the department
beyond the instructor, the Chair, and, for administrative purposes, the department
administrator. When in doubt, don’t share them with others, unless your department’s structure
and agreed practice included sharing this information.
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Evaluations will, of course, remain accessible to the Dean of Faculty and the College’s
Advisory Committee on Appointments, Reappointments, and Promotions.
• We encourage you to refrain from printing course evaluation materials unless
necessary. Ditto saving local electronic copies. Now that the online course evaluations
are available on demand from a central highly secure source, local copies in print or in
electronic form are discouraged.
1) To access WebReports, you must either be using an on-campus computer OR
connecting yourself to VPN (virtual private network) before trying to click on the link
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noted below. If you’re off-campus, you must be connected through VPN to use this
service.
a. Instructions for VPN are available from LITS help pages:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/tech/vpn_info
2) From the front page of ISIS, pick the “Using ISIS” from the left menu, and then pick the
WebReports link at the bottom of the right:.
2) Type your usual MHC userID and password (same as for ISIS) in the WebReports login
page:
3) The menu of reports to which you have access will appear. Click on
“DEPT_COURSE_EVAL”.
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If you don’t see the DEPT_COURSE_EVAL report, use the blue navigation bar at the
bottom to pick “D” and, if needed, use the single arrows at bottom left or right to scroll more
finely through the alphabetical list of reports.
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If you still don’t see it nor any of the other DEPT reports and you are a
department/program Chair or a department administrator, contact Tara MacKay,
Associate Registrar in the Registrar’s Office.
4. A new page will appear so that you may enter the parameters for selecting the evaluations
you want and the report output format you want.
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In the middle of the page, replace the “< All Values >” defaults in the appropriate field or
combination of fields to specify which of the valid evaluations for courses in your
program/department you want included on the report.
At the bottom of the page (in the “Output Options” section), use the little blue down-caret
to see the choices and then select Adobe Acrobat (PDF), as the Report Format.
Although it is possible to direct the output to other formats, for best results, we suggest
you always elect Adobe Acrobat (PDF).
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5. Press Generate.
6. While your report is running, you’ll be shown a window that displays your selections and this
bottom section, with a spinning wheel showing you the system is working to create your report:
7. Wait patiently until the report is ready. When complete, this page will appear:
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8. Press the “View results in a new window.” link. Your PDF file of the evaluations will appear
in a new window.
See sample of report on next page.
If instead, you see “Report generation failed with status code -01.” the system was not able to
find any courses that both matched your selection criteria and fit within your assigned security
(your own department/program). See the “Tips for Entering Selection Criteria” section below
for tips. The problem is usually easy to remedy!
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Navigate through the evaluations by using the scroll bar at right, or any of the usual tools your
PDF reader provides.
9. After you review the course evaluations in your pdf file, close this window and you will be
returned to the WebReports results screen. From there, you may return to the selection screen
to order another pdf by pressing on the little button in the upper right corner.
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Getting Errors? Tips for Entering Selection Criteria
If you enter selection criteria and, instead of getting a “View results in a new window” link, you
see the following, please read the trouble-shooting tips below.
Troubleshooting Tips
General:
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To fill in any of the fields below TERM, remove the defaulted “< All Values >” and type
the values you want to search for. Don’t forget to remove the brackets “<” and “>”!
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A common mistake is to not to have cleared out conflicting criteria, for example to ask
for subject=Classics and then to forget to clear that field when you next search for
faculty member ofrau. Since Ombretta Frau doesn’t teach any Classics courses, the
search will be unsuccessful and you’ll get an error.
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Remember that regardless of what you select, you won’t be able to retrieve evaluations
outside of the department/program you chair/administer – even if you taught the
courses. (e.g., If you’re the Chair of POLIT but someone else is chairing CST, if you
search for CST courses, even if you taught them, the system will not find any course
evaluations that match your selection criteria AND fit within your WebReports access
rights.)
o For evaluations of courses you taught outside of the department you’re currently
chairing, use ISIS to view and/or print your evaluations.
o If you find you can’t access your programs or do have inappropriate access to
more than you should, please notify Tara MacKay in the Registrar’s Office. She’ll
try to adjust your access.
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WebReports can be annoyingly picky about the format in which you enter your choices.
Try entering your selections in all capital letters.
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Tips for Specific Fields
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Term: click on the little blue downward
choose from the available semesters.
caret at the right of the field to
o Terms prior to Fall 2011 won’t be available since evaluations weren’t collected via
ISIS until then. If you need earlier evaluations, contact the Dean of Faculty’s
Office.
o Evaluations for the most recent term aren’t available until after the date in early
January/late May when semester grades were due to the Registrar’s Office. And
remember they won’t really be complete/finalized then until after the prescribed
10-day period for elective comment or validation.
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Subject: This is the abbreviation used throughout ISIS, at the front of the course
number. Example: PHIL for courses in Philosophy.
o If your department offers courses under several different subject designations,
like CLASSIC, GREEK, LATIN and ITAL, you will need to request each of these
to get all the evaluations for the courses offered in your department.
o WebReports is picky about the format you must use to specify your choices.
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When in doubt, use capital letters when you type and, if you enter multiple
selections, separate them with a comma.
o I’ve listed below some formats that work and don’t work:
or
work.
Won’t work. Get rid of those brackets.
Works. Note the comma after ENGL
Also works. As long as you include the comma,
you don’t need also a space between the two entries.
Won’t work. Needs a comma after ENGL.
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Course: Use this field to search for all sections of a course. Example entering BIOL145 would retrieve all sections of BIOL-145: BIOL-145-01, BIOL-145-02 etc. If you
want to search for multiple sections, be sure to type them with a comma in between,
like:
ENGL-234, ENGL-368
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o Remember that you will only have access to course evaluations for courses in the
subjects you are authorized to view. And, if the course is cross-listed, your
department must be considered the primary department for you to be able to
retrieve its course evaluations via WebReports.
o You can use an asterisk as a wildcard character in all fields except term and
faculty username. For example, to search for all 300-level courses in ENGL, you
could fill in the COURSE field like this:
Pulls all courses in ENGL with numbers
starting with “3”, so all 300-level courses in English.
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Section: Use this field to search for a specific section of a course to which you should
have access -- e.g. BIOL-145-03.
Faculty Username: To find all the qualifying evaluations for a particular faculty member,
enter his/her Mount Holyoke username. The username is the part of his/her MHC email
address before the @mtholyoke.edu. Examples: hhanson, kchaydon, or hamilton
o Do not enter this in mixed case. Use either all capital letters or all lower-case.
o The asterisk wildcard will not work on this field. You must type the instructor’s full
username.
Questions?
Questions about the timing, policy and process of course evaluations should be directed to the
Dean of Faculty’s staff, particularly Amy Berube (aberube, x2858). Chairs experiencing
problems accessing the evaluations should contact the Associate Registrar, Tara MacKay
(tmackay, x2194).
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