News and events archive

Hi,

from time to time, students contact us at SKAS with complaints about the quality of certain courses or certain teachers at FI.

If you have a legitimate concern about the quality of a course or someone's teaching, the basis for any change is that such a concern must be expressed "in black and white" through official channels – for example, in the course opinion poll, which opened this week for the fall 2025 semester. In fact, the more times the same complaint appears there, the greater the chance that it will be addressed (other places to report issues include student representatives in the programme boards, or writing a personal email to the head of the department responsible for the course or teacher)

The course opinion poll should also now result in a faculty-wide report on how the faculty handles the survey results (source, in Czech only). We will see as to what the first of these reports will look like. But now to the main point of this post:

The university-wide question "Please indicate the total number of hours you spent on this subject during this semester" has disappeared from the course opinion poll after the Spring 2024 semester. Based on feedback from FI students, for whom this numerical value does have some informative value (pun intended), we managed, in cooperation with the faculty management, to return this question to the survey, at least as a faculty-specific question.

And since changes were already being made, the original single question became three, which will allow for a more granular description of the time demands of the course:

• Please indicate the number of hours you spent on this course during this semester. (faculty question)
  1. Hours regularly each week of the semester (e.g., direct classes, preparation, regular homework)
  2. Extra hours in total during the semester (e.g., project with irregular workload)
  3. Hours during the exam period in total

The 1st question therefore includes the number of hours per week during the teaching part of the semester, including lectures, seminars, preparation for them, regular assignments, etc. For the fall semester of 2025, the teaching part of the semester means the period from September 15, 2025, to December 19, 2025. In other words, this question now refers to the regular weekly workload for the course, not the total number of hours spent on the above activities for the entire period.

The 2nd question covers irregular activities (also during the teaching part of the semester) that did not "fit" or do not belong in the first question, i.e., semester-long projects, their milestones, block teaching, etc. Due to the irregularity of these activities, the 2nd question refers to the total for the entire period, not for a week or something similar.

The 3rd question then simply covers everything during the exam period, which typically includes studying for exams and the exam dates themselves, but also continuing work on semester-long projects, project defenses, preparation for them, etc.

Good luck with the upcoming exam period, and please don't forget to fill out the course survey at the end 💛