Evaluation forms: Making reviews a breeze

You’ve probably encountered evaluation forms multiple times throughout your education and career. These forms help managers, teachers, students, employees and others to provide feedback in classrooms and the workplace. 

Using online forms for evaluations streamlines the process of providing feedback to individuals and teams. They allow evaluators to consolidate all the collected information in one place for reference and benchmarking purposes. 

Let’s take a closer look at online evaluation forms.

Used in many settings, evaluation forms are tools for giving feedback about performance. These customisable forms include questions that help measure strengths, areas for improvement and overall progress towards goals. Evaluation forms can have many uses in education, business and sports. 

Evaluation forms and feedback forms serve different purposes. Feedback forms collect opinions and thoughts about a product, service or business from someone else. Evaluation forms assess and provide constructive feedback about someone’s performance. Clear, thoughtful feedback is crucial for personal and professional development and can have a significant impact on employee experience.

Evaluations can take different forms depending on the industry, the purpose and the role of the person being evaluated. Try these common examples and valuable tips to create your evaluation forms: 

Employee evaluations often include performance assessments, such as 360-degree feedback, employee-led self-evaluations, team performance evaluations, skills assessments, manager evaluations and career development evaluations, among others. 

In each evaluation, you’ll provide feedback to an employee or your team regarding their performance during a specific period. Administrators can use this feedback to evaluate employees' ability to perform their roles and responsibilities, measure goals and plan training programmes. 

Regular reviews can provide valuable data to set benchmarks based on progress trends. Try to schedule evaluations within a quarterly or yearly period. 

Your employee evaluation form will vary according to your goals. A basic form typically measures an employee’s progress towards specific job criteria such as job knowledge, work quality, teamwork, communication skills, goal achievement and more. An effective employee evaluation form should be comprehensive, objective and easy to use. 

To create an employee evaluation form, start by defining the goals and objectives of the evaluation as well as the timeline and process for completing it. Clearly outline the criteria that evaluators will use to assess the employee’s performance and the rating system for each category. You should also include a space for comments so that the evaluator can provide specific feedback about the employee’s strengths, areas for improvement and suggestions for future growth.

When designing an employee evaluation form, include fields for essential data, such as the employee’s name, the reviewer’s name and the reviewer’s title. You should also consider including relevant job-specific fields, such as:

Finally, provide clear instructions for completing the evaluation and offer support and training if necessary.

An employee performance evaluation form is a tool that employers use to assess the work performance of their employees over a specific time period of time. This form typically measures an employee’s past performance, identifies areas for improvement and sets future performance goals. 

The feedback shared in these evaluations can help managers make decisions about promotions, pay rises and professional development opportunities. Performance evaluations are also critical for clearly communicating and documenting concerns about an employee’s work.  

For an employee performance evaluation, you’ll need to include fields for:

To get started, try our employee performance survey template. You can customise your template to add additional fields, your company’s logo and related brand colours.

A 360-degree evaluation is an employee evaluation form that helps teams assess an employee’s performance and behaviours. Evaluators typically include a mix of peers, direct reports (if any), supervisors and sometimes even clients or customers. This multidimensional approach gives organisations a holistic view of an individual's work performance, leadership skills, teamwork, communication abilities and other job-related competencies.  

360-degree evaluations can help you identify employee strengths and pinpoint growth opportunities. These evaluations can give you a bigger picture of an employee’s performance beyond what their direct manager might know. 360-degree evaluations can also reduce bias and ensure more equitable evaluations while fostering a culture of openness, mutual respect and constructive feedback.

For 360-degree evaluations, you’ll need to ask each reviewer – whether a peer, a direct report or a manager – to share specific feedback about the employee’s performance. To conduct an effective 360-degree survey, focus on asking open-ended questions and avoid asking leading questions that can influence participants’ answers. 

Here are a few examples of 360-degree feedback survey questions: 

Hiring teams can use candidate evaluation forms to rapidly evaluate and compare job applicants during recruitment. These forms help identify candidates who meet the job requirements and share feedback on a candidate's qualifications, experience, skills and potential cultural fit within the organisation. They can help standardise the review and comparison of candidates, ensuring a fair recruitment process and enabling hiring teams to choose the best candidate for the role.

Furthermore, these forms serve as a record of the decision-making process, which can be used to provide feedback to unsuccessful candidates or for internal reviews of the hiring process.

When creating a candidate evaluation form, identify the key skills, attributes and experiences necessary for success in the role. These may include technical skills, soft skills, education and job experience.

Next, develop a rating system that allows you to evaluate each candidate’s qualifications objectively. This rating system could be a numerical scale, a series of tick boxes or a list of traits you are looking for in a candidate. You should also include space for notes and comments so that you can document your observations and thoughts about each candidate. 

Teacher evaluation forms are commonly used in education to assess the performance of teachers and lecturers. After observing them during a lesson, administrators often use these forms to evaluate a teacher's performance. Some teachers also distribute evaluation forms to their students in order to receive feedback on their teaching.

A solid system of teacher evaluation will:

To create a teacher evaluation form, start by identifying the areas for evaluation. You may want to consider evaluating the teacher’s classroom management skills, their ability to deliver instruction, their knowledge of the subject matter and their ability to engage students in the learning process. Once you have identified the areas for evaluation, you can then create a rating scale to assess the teacher’s performance in each area.

Make sure you include fields for essential data, such as the teacher’s name, the evaluator’s name and the evaluator’s title. You should also consider including relevant job-specific fields such as the key stage or subject taught.

Evaluation forms gather feedback from students or participants to assess the effectiveness of the instructor's teaching style, course content and overall performance. Educational institutions use these forms to identify areas of improvement for their instructors and enhance the quality of their programmes.

The first step is to identify the key areas that will be evaluated, such as teaching ability, knowledge of the subject matter, classroom management and communication skills. Once you have identified these areas, select questions that help assess the teacher’s performance in each area. This could be a simple numerical scale (one to five) or a more detailed scale that includes descriptions of each rating level.

When designing the form, include fields for important data, such as the teacher’s name, the evaluator’s name and the evaluator’s title. Depending on the nature of the evaluation, you may also want to include relevant job-specific fields, such as the key stage or subject taught.

Educational institutions and training providers use course evaluation forms to gather student feedback about their learning experiences. These forms are designed to assess the effectiveness of the teaching methods, the relevance and clarity of the material presented, the pacing of the course, the quality of resources provided and overall participant satisfaction. 

Course evaluation forms allow educators and trainers to capture insights into what works well in their courses and what could be improved on. This feedback loop is essential for maintaining high educational standards, ensuring that course content remains effective and creating a supportive and engaging learning environment. 

Continuing education through training courses helps keep employees informed and updated about new technological advances, procedures and other necessary skills. Training may be provided by managers, guest speakers, webinars or others.

Training evaluation forms are used to measure the effectiveness of your training sessions and identify areas for improvement in future training.

Training evaluation forms should include information such as the following:

To get started, try our training course evaluation survey template.

After completing the recruitment and interview process, HR departments can send interview (or candidate experience) evaluation forms to candidates to gather feedback. The information collected can be used to improve the recruitment process.

Your interview evaluation form should be designed to collect data to help HR departments identify strengths and weaknesses in their recruiting and interview processes. The questions should be clear, concise and easy to answer.
Include questions that address the candidate's experience and perception of the recruitment process. Questions about the clarity of the job description, the timeliness of communication and the overall professionalism of the recruitment team can provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement.

Additionally, including questions about the interview process itself, such as the structure of the interview, the quality of the questions asked and the conduct of the interviewers, can help HR departments improve the quality of their interviews. By soliciting candidate feedback, HR departments can proactively enhance their recruitment processes and improve their employer brand.

Regardless of the evaluation you need to perform, you’ll benefit from creating your evaluation form online. Online forms make it easy to record and retrieve information to be used during an in-person, online evaluation meeting or review.

Ensure that your evaluation form is simple to use, especially if you’re creating it for others. State directions clearly at the beginning of the evaluation and consider questions carefully to ensure that others using the form know precisely what information is being asked for in each question or item. 

Your language should be simple and concise so that each person using the evaluation form will interpret the instructions similarly.

Rating scales are an excellent way to make your evaluation forms easy to understand and ensure consistency between evaluations. 

For example, a Likert scale (a satisfaction scale) asks a closed-ended question and provides five or seven answers ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. 

Not all aspects of an evaluation can be addressed in multiple choice or rating scale questions. Sometimes, the person completing the evaluation form needs space to include their thoughts, opinions and observations. This adds a human touch to an evaluation. Include open answer fields for text input.

Open-ended questions based on our training example may include:

At the beginning of the evaluation form, include important information such as the employee's name, employment anniversary date, evaluation period, department and other relevant facts for identification purposes.

Creating an evaluation form can be made easy with SurveyMonkey. Our comprehensive Question Bank can help you formulate the best questions and we have hundreds of templates available to save you time. 

All SurveyMonkey templates are fully customisable. You can easily add your logo, branded graphics, images and colours to make your evaluation form reflect your organisation. Additionally, you can edit and change template questions to work with your specific evaluation needs.

Check out some of our most popular evaluation form templates here. 

Online evaluation forms are widely used to assess performance. Make your online form now, starting with a SurveyMonkey template. 

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