Information on these pages is also available in the Faculty of Medicine's document "Evaluation within the University of Otago Faculty of Medicine" available from the Faculty of Medicine Office.

The purpose of evaluation
Evaluation is an ongoing process. It is undertaken in order to improve the effectiveness of student learning and ultimately the health care of the population. It is an iterative process of quality assurance and enhancement.

Evaluation can determine whether courses are achieving what they set out to do and whether the curriculum as a whole is serving the purpose for which it was designed. Evaluation can identify both problems and successes in order to inform the future development of courses and the curriculum. The information gained from evaluation can lead to changes in any aspect of teaching and assessment practices, identification of training needs for teachers or the simple acknowledgement of the high quality of a particular course.

What is evaluated?
Evaluation of courses involves a careful examination of the ways in which the course functions: whether it leads to appropriate student learning outcomes, how it is taught and how students experience taking part in it. Evaluation also has a role in ensuring that we match the learning with the expectations of future employers and that graduates are ‘fit to practice’. These very different kinds of issues require very different approaches in order to determine what is going on within a particular course and across courses.

Figure 1 shows some of the evaluation processes within the medical curriculum. This document focuses on evaluations of students' and teachers' experiences of courses. References to other relevant documents or information sources are provided where necessary.