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The purpose of this paper is to assess pharmacy students' perceptions of the usefulness of the teaching evaluation (TE) instrument and the rationale behind their responses.

A comprehensive survey instrument is constructed by the authors. Pharmacy students at University of Jordan (JU) are asked to complete the survey instrument. The questionnaire is completed during students first required, regularly scheduled class.

Of the 577 pharmacy students who are invited to participate, 557 completed the survey for a response rate of 96.5 percent. The majority of the 557 pharmacy students viewed student evaluation of teaching as worthwhile (4.11 out of five on a Likert scale anchored at “1, strongly disagree” and “5, strongly agree”), but agreed that the faculty members receiving the best evaluations are not always the most effective teachers (3.54 out of five).

This paper only surveyed pharmacy students who are studying at JU and hence the results from this paper cannot be generalized to all pharmacy schools or countries in the Middle East. In addition, results may be biased by a social desirability effect whereas students respond in a manner that is different than their true perceptions.

Students acknowledge that the nature of the course, answering questions during office hours, and a pleasant instructor personality positively affected their evaluation score, while the majority of students disagree with the belief that having less work to do and easy exams impacted positively their evaluation scores.

This paper is one of the few attempts to assess the students' perception towards the TE process and the rationale behind their responses in the Middle East.