Teaching partners then visit each other's classes on several occasions during the school year and exchange feedback. Faculty also are encouraged to videotape their classes, and review the film either with their partner or by themselves. The teaching partnerships program has been well-received, and most faculty members have participated at one point or another. Faculty members are encouraged to distribute course evaluations at the end of each semester, and nearly everybody does. The course evaluation forms include questions calling for numerical evaluations of several aspects of the class and the teaching as well as more open-ended questions calling for written student comments.
Students generally take the evaluations quite seriously, and many provide detailed comments.
These student course evaluations are on file in the law library for student use in course selection, and the Law Weekly last semester started publishing a list of the most popular law school classes. Faculty members receive the course evaluations back for their perusal after they submit grades for the course. Evaluation of teaching is an important part of the tenure review process. All three members of tenure subcommittees sit in on several of the tenure candidate's classes and report results back to the appointments committee, which then discusses and evaluates the candidate's teaching. The subcommittee also interviews large numbers of students from past and present classes for their input.