Evaluation forms: Making reviews a breeze

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

Using online forms for evaluations streamlines 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 deeper look at online evaluation forms.

Used in many settings, an evaluation form is a tool to give feedback about performance. These customizable forms include questions that help measure strengths, areas of improvement, and overall progress toward 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 on someone’s performance. Clear, thoughtful feedback is crucial for personal and professional development and can significantly impact 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, like 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 programs. 

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 based on 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 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 on 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 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 improvement areas, and sets future performance goals. 

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

Related reading: 20 self evaluation questions that managers can use for employee performance reviews

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

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

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

360 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 evaluations can also reduce bias and ensure more equitable evaluations while fostering a culture of openness, mutual respect, and constructive feedback.

For 360 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 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 evaluate and compare job applicants during recruitment quickly. 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 organization. They can help standardize 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 checkboxes, 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 professors. 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 to receive feedback on their teaching.

A solid system of teacher evaluation will:

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

Be sure to 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 grade level 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 programs.

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, 1-5, 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 grade level 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 and what could be improved about their courses. 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 on new technological advances, procedures, and other necessary skills. Training may be provided by managers, guest speakers, webinars, or more.

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:

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 behavior 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 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 extremely harmful to highly positive. 

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 can 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 customizable. You can easily add your logo, branded graphics, images, and colors to make your evaluation form reflect your organization. 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, starting with a SurveyMonkey template now. 

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