Surveys are an integral part of any quality assurance process, especially in measuring student satisfaction when it comes to their academic or student experience at AUI. They provide key metrics and insights on how the university should focus its resources to improve its quality of service. In addition, they are a valuable reporting tool for internal (OIRE, Student Affairs, Academics, SGA) and external entities (NECHE, Board of Trustees, etc.)
Last Wednesday, students were advised that a quality management survey will be made available for students on the Jenzabar portal. The purpose of this survey is to collect data on the academic experience of students during these past few weeks. This will eventually help the administration assess the perceived quality of classes.
The problem is not having to fill the survey, but its format
There are numerous issues with the way surveying students is done at the University. In the case of this last survey, two major challenges made the user experience very unpleasant. First, students were forced to fill it before accessing their Jenzabar account. This issue is believed to have been solved by the SGA, which pushed for surveys to be open for a week before they become mandatory, to allow students to fill it when they have time (of course, procrastinators will always exist). Second, a high number of the questions were redundant and not related to the class itself. These challenges made the task extremely annoying for students.
These challenges are not only unpleasant for students, they also limit the university’s ability to collect concrete and realistic data about the student experience in classes. Students who are in a hurry to access their portal will end up filling the survey in a random manner (either fully agree on everything if they are nice, or fully disagree if they are angry). This yields survey results that do not capture the key metrics that can be used to improve the quality of service in Academic Affairs.
Surveying Gen-Z students require a little bit more creativity
The issue of data collection at AUI is not to be restricted to academic evaluations, it also extends to other facets of the university experience. Take, for example, the SOS (Student Opinion Survey, don’t worry). The survey is extremely important for the university to evaluate the satisfaction of students when it comes to services such as Dining, Housing, Athletics, SGA, SAO, and other departments. The student engagement with such surveys is typically low because of many reasons, including the inadequacy of the data collection format (long surveys, complicated wordings, classical communication strategies, etc.). Hence, we have to rethink how we assess student satisfaction with more “Gen-Z friendly” methods.
Make no mistake, students often are ready to share their opinion about services at AUI. The analysis of comments and reactions on different social media networks allows us as a community to absorb a good part of the student perception. The challenge now is to switch to other methods such as focus groups, short/direct surveys, analysis of reactions, incentives, and creative communication strategies.