Confidentiality of Mercury Data

Access to Mercury

Access to Mercury for Unit Heads Access to Mercury for Mercury Liaisons Access to Mercury for Delegates

Access is automatically granted to the head of the academic unit as indicated in the Organization Table. If you do not have access, please ensure that your record in Banner has been updated as Chair/Director.

If you have a new the interim unit head, please complete this webform. Please update your authorization should staffing responsibilities change

The academic unit head should send the name and contact information for the Mercury Liaison and backup to the Mercury System Administrator.

To authorize or remove a staff member as a Mercury Liaison, complete this webform.

Designating a Mercury Liaison does not give them access to the course evaluation results within your unit. Please update your Liaison authorization should staffing responsibilities change.

If you wish to authorize a delegate, it is important to keep in mind that they will have complete access to all numerical results and written comments for courses offered by your academic unit.

To authorize or remove a staff member as a delegate, complete this webform. Please update your delegate authorization should staffing responsibilities change.


Working with course evaluation data

  • Avoid printing documents from Mercury. If documents are printed, they should be stored in a locked cabinet. To dispose of the documents, please shred them.

  • Avoid emailing Mercury results. Individuals have access to their personal results through their Minerva accounts. If there are any access issues, please contact the mercury.info [at] mcgill.ca (Mercury System Administrator).

  • Do not save Mercury results on shared departmental drives, external hard drives, and cloud storage solutions (view Cloud Data Storage Directive). Should follow-up analysis be done, save the documents on your individual, work-related drive on McGill servers (typically the F drive).


Policy Statements

7. Anonymity and confidentiality

7.1 All course evaluation results shall be anonymous.

7.2 Written evaluations in the form of comments shall be considered confidential to the Instructor and the Academic Unit Head or their delegates.

  • Written comments are never disseminated to the McGill community.

  • Instructors may use intact sets of comments in their Teaching Portfolios.

  • While the unit head does have complete access to the results, re-appointment, tenure and promotion committees may consider written comments only as submitted by the candidate.

7.3 Numerical evaluation results shall be confidential to the instructor, the Academic Unit Head, and the Dean of the Faculty or their delegates.

  • When an adequate response rate is met and the instructor has not objected to access, numerical evaluation results are disseminated to the McGill community.

7.4 Numerical results may be used by individuals other than the Instructor in reporting only if presented in aggregate form.

  • When reporting on results to others, you may refer to course evaluation results, but only in such a way that it is not possible to discern the identity of individual courses and instructors.


If you have any questions about data access and confidentiality, please contact the mercury.info [at] mcgill.ca (Mercury System Administrator).

While this web page is accessible worldwide, McGill University is on land which has served and continues to serve as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. Teaching and Learning Services acknowledges and thanks the diverse Indigenous peoples whose footsteps mark this territory on which peoples of the world now gather. This land acknowledgement is shared as a starting point to provide context for further learning and action.

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