An Explanation of the Experiences of Faculty Members with the Education Evaluation System in Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Iran

The main purpose and role of higher education is to train professional workforce in the fields required by society through training them the necessary skills for their field. Today, the promotion of educational quality is considered as the basis of an authentic higher educational system. Therefore, the most efficient way to improve educational quality is educational evaluation in order to understand the success rate of faculty members on achieving this goal. Nevertheless, researches indicate that the evaluation of faculty members seems to be one of the most controversial issues of medical education and needs further attention and research. Obtaining faculty member's experiences, which is the main goal of this study, seems to be valuable. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to explore faculty member's experiences of the educational evaluation system. The present qualitative study was carried out using content analysis in Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Iran, in 2013. Participants included 8 faculty members, who volunteered to take part in the study. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and purposeful sampling and continued until saturation. From the results, 3 main themes of lack of a clear objective for the evaluation system, inappropriate methods of evaluating faculty members, and the impact of their characteristics on the evaluation were achieved. The study results show the necessity of comprehensive fundamental reform in the method of educational evaluation of faculty members, improvement of evaluators’ awareness and commitment, improvement of education quality, and ultimately, promotion of higher educational systems. Moreover, the provision of solutions for the enhancement of faculty members’ efficacy and motivation is required. On the other hand, it is essential to diminish their worries and concerns through creating an authentic, justice-oriented evaluation system, and ultimately, to achieve maximum improvement in educational policies and programs.