After 20 years and 250,000 students, our company is considering ditching the Overall course evaluation score (1-5) and instead just averaging all the other student questions on the evaluation and providing that mathematically (x.xx) as that particular eval's overall score.

Then we will provide the event cummulative by averaging all the overall scores together.

The complaint is because the Overall question's individual score (when the student fills in 1-5) seems to often bring down the average when all the other eval questions are more inclined to score higher to 5.0.

Anyone have any thoughts, past experience here? I'd be curious if the Overall course score (as a student question) is industry-standard or not?

Without getting into a discussion of the value (or lack thereof) of numerical Level 1 scores, I wonder:
- If the participant's overall score is less than the average of "other eval questions", are you asking the right other questions?
- Is "overall score" a meaningful metric for your business, the instructor or the participants? (e.g. can you show a direct correlation between high overall score and course sales or repeat business from customers?)

Yes, it seems to be an industry standard for whatever reason(s).

The key question I think you should ask yourself is - What do we want to know? What would be the most meaningful information we can gather and how can we gather it?

And to put in a word purely for the sake of those truly interested in quantitative analysis, the only thing you can get from a participant is that participant's subjective opinion. If you wanna talk about useful data, the external validity of that type of data is practically nil. If you ask the right questions, it can be very insightful for the facilitator regarding that particular session, but that's really about it.

P.S. There are many, many peer-reviewed studies on this topic. I suggest starting with the library if you want some solid data to support or refute whatever it is you're attempting to change (or not).