Students’ evaluations of teaching is a common practice in higher education institutions, with the main purpose of improving course quality and effectiveness. In this paper we would like to contribute to the existing literature on course and teaching evaluation by providing an empirical analysis based on questionnaires collected by an Italian private institution, namely the Libera Università Maria Ss. Assunta (LUMSA), for several degrees in Social Sciences. In order to identify the main factors affecting students’ satisfaction, we use not only teaching indicators and degree-specific characteristics, but also control for student-specific characteristics. Our analysis is based on a Multiple Correspondence Analysis for categorical variables, which represents a very useful method to study the multidimensional relationship among qualitative variables, along with a hierarchical clustering, in order to better summarize the results. Our findings reveal that student satisfaction relates to teaching and course organization. Moreover, we find some evidence that students typically evaluate their course on the basis of their experience rather than their personal interests.

学生对教学的评价是高等教育机构的普遍做法，其主要目的是提高课程质量和效果。在本文中，我们希望通过提供基于意大利私立机构（即 Libera Università Maria Ss）收集的问卷的实证分析，为现有的课程和教学评估文献做出贡献。Assunta (LUMSA)，获得多个社会科学学位。为了确定影响学生满意度的主要因素，我们不仅使用教学指标和学位特征，还对学生特征进行控制。我们的分析基于分类变量的多重对应分析，它代表了一种非常有用的方法来研究定性变量之间的多维关系，以及层次聚类，以便更好地总结结果。我们的研究结果表明，学生满意度与教学和课程组织有关。此外，我们发现一些证据表明学生通常根据他们的经验而不是他们的个人兴趣来评估他们的课程。