Form questions
Student satisfaction survey questions, grouped by service
Thirty questions is a full institutional round and twelve works as a mid semester check. Three should never be dropped: whether teaching staff explain things clearly, whether students knew where to go when they needed help, and one open question naming a single change. The first two are the strongest predictors of whether a student stays enrolled.
A single satisfaction score for a college cannot be acted on by anybody, because no one person owns teaching, the library, enrolment and the counselling service. These questions split the institution into the teams that run it and rate each one separately.
The questions
About your study
What year level are you in?DropdownRequired
First year answers differ so sharply that an uncut average describes nobody.
Which faculty or school are you in?DropdownRequired
How are you studying this semester?Single choice
On campus, online, a mix. It explains most of the variance in the facilities grid.
Are you studying full time or part time?Single choice
Do you work more than fifteen hours a week alongside study?Single choice
Working students rate timetabling and support services very differently.
Is this your first qualification at this level?Single choice
Teaching
Teaching staff explain things clearlyRating gridRequired
Row one of a five point agreement grid.
Assessment criteria were made clear before the work was dueRating gridRequired
Row two.
Feedback arrived in time to be usefulRating gridRequired
Row three.
The workload matched what the unit outline describedRating gridRequired
Row four.
I can get help from teaching staff outside classRating gridRequired
Row five. Availability, not quality, is the usual complaint.
How many contact hours do you have in a typical week?Number
An estimate. Compare it with the teaching grid by faculty.
Facilities
How good are the library and study spaces?Rating gridRequired
Row one of a facilities grid with a have not used first column.
How good are the labs or studios?Rating gridRequired
Row two.
How good is the campus wifi?Rating gridRequired
Row three. Consistently the lowest scoring row on most campuses.
How good is the food on campus?Rating gridRequired
Row four.
How good are parking and transport?Rating gridRequired
Row five.
Is there somewhere you can study on campus between classes?Single choice
A plain operational question with a plain operational answer.
Support services
How good is enrolment and timetabling?Rating gridRequired
Row one of a support grid, also with a have not used column.
How good is academic skills help?Rating gridRequired
Row two.
How good are careers and placement services?Rating gridRequired
Row three.
How good is the IT help desk?Rating gridRequired
Row four.
How good is the student association?Rating gridRequired
Row five.
When you needed help this semester, did you know where to go?Single choiceRequired
Always through rarely, plus an I did not need help option.
Have you had a problem that took more than three attempts to resolve?Single choice
Effort, not satisfaction. It finds the process that quietly costs enrolments.
Wellbeing and belonging
I feel part of this institutionRating grid
Row one of a short belonging grid, and the whole grid is optional.
I know at least one staff member I could talk toRating grid
Row two. A single named adult predicts retention better than most satisfaction measures.
I can manage my study load alongside everything elseRating grid
Row three.
What should this institution keep doing?Long text
What one change would improve your semester?Long textRequired
One change, as specific as the student can make it.
Which questions to make required
Year level and faculty are required because an uncut institutional average is a number nobody owns. The teaching, facilities and support grids are required because a partly completed grid cannot be averaged and those three grids are what each team receives. The knowing where to go question is required because it separates a service that is bad from one that is merely invisible. The wellbeing grid is optional in full, and only one open question is required, so a student in a hurry still produces a usable response.
- What year level are you in?
- Which faculty or school are you in?
- Teaching staff explain things clearly
- Assessment criteria were made clear before the work was due
- Feedback arrived in time to be useful
- The workload matched what the unit outline described
- I can get help from teaching staff outside class
- How good are the library and study spaces?
- How good are the labs or studios?
- How good is the campus wifi?
- How good is the food on campus?
- How good are parking and transport?
- How good is enrolment and timetabling?
- How good is academic skills help?
- How good are careers and placement services?
- How good is the IT help desk?
- How good is the student association?
- When you needed help this semester, did you know where to go?
- What one change would improve your semester?
The form built from these questions
A static copy of a form built from part of the bank, exactly as it renders.
How to change this for a different institution
A school rather than a college. Rewrite every grid row in plain sentences a fourteen year old reads the same way an eighteen year old does, cut the support services grid to three rows, and drop the careers row unless a careers adviser actually exists. Add a question about how safe the student feels getting to and from school, which belongs in a school instrument and not in a college one. A single faculty or department. Remove the faculty dropdown and replace it with a unit or programme dropdown, then keep everything else. The comparison becomes programme against programme, which is more useful to a head of department than a whole of institution average, and the response rate is usually much higher because the person asking is recognisable. An online only provider. The facilities grid becomes the platform grid: the learning system, the library databases, the video quality, the technical support and the assessment submission process. Add one question about whether the student has ever met another student on the course, since isolation, not content, is what ends most online enrolments, and no facilities question will ever find it.
Questions people ask
How long should a student satisfaction survey be?
About six minutes is the practical ceiling, and pagination by service makes that feel shorter because each page has a visible end. Thirty questions sounds long until you notice that twenty of them are grid rows answered with a single tap, which is how a survey this wide stays inside the time.
Why include a have not used column?
Because a first year student has not been to the careers service and should not be rating it. Without an explicit exit they select the middle option, which quietly drags the average down and makes a well run service look mediocre to whoever reads the report.
Should it be anonymous?
Year level and faculty are enough to act on and no name is needed. Anything narrower begins to identify students in small or specialised programmes. State the reporting floor on the thank you screen, because students assume the institution can identify them unless told otherwise.
When in the semester should it run?
Late enough that students have used the services and early enough that the answers can change something for them. Week eight or nine is the usual compromise. Running it in the final week means every finding lands after the cohort has left, which is why response rates drop year on year.
How do you get students to answer at all?
Publish what changed because of the last round, on the first screen, in one line per change. Rates of fifteen per cent are common for an emailed institutional survey and thirty is achievable when the survey has a visible history of consequences. Prize draws raise the count and not the quality.
Should teaching and services be in one survey?
Yes, provided they sit in separate grids. Students experience the institution as one thing and will mention the timetable in a teaching comment anyway. The separation matters at the reporting end, where each grid goes to the team that owns it rather than into one institutional average.
What is the single most useful question here?
Whether the student knew where to go when they needed help. It is cheap to fix, it predicts a great deal of the satisfaction scores elsewhere in the survey, and it catches the specific failure where a good service exists but is only known to students who already knew about it.
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On writing the questions themselves, read How to write survey questions. For everything the builder can do, see the form maker. Step by step: Create a form with AI, then View, export and manage your responses.
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