Unit Satisfaction Survey

Introduction

The Unit Satisfaction Survey (USS) is the official UC education and teaching evaluation and quality assurance mechanism. The cumulative results are used for external reporting and filtered down hierarchically to Heads of School and Unit Convenors.

Method

Measures

The USS contains six standard questions and a single item for open-ended comments. Students are requested to complete a USS for each unit.

Unit Satisfaction Survey Items
1. I found this unit intellectually stimulating.
2. The unit was well organised.
3. The unit helped me to develop skills and knowledge.
4. The methods of assessing student work were fair and appropriate.
5. I received feedback that assisted my learning.
6. Overall I was satisfied with this unit.
Do you have any comments on this unit that you would like to make?

A seven-point Likert Agree-Disagree response scale is used:

Procedure

Students access the USS for each unit via OSIS, the secure student web interface and information portal.

Results

The USS was implemented Semester 2, 2006. Overall descriptive results indicating the percentage of responses to each of the six closed-ended items, broken down by the ten schools within the university are available to university staff (see links).

For example, for the overall satisfaction:

The response rate to the USS was modest; approximately 30% (exact figures not reported in university Sem 2, 2006 report).

Discussion

Efforts to engage in transparent evaluation of educational and teaching are to be encouraged and successful implementation is to be commended. However, much more can be done by the university. Only some first steps have been taken in this endeavour and its somewhat surprising that it took the university until Semester 2, 2006 to implement such a scheme (and even then, only because of external pressure from federal quality assurance requirements).

In terms of information available, there is a lack of information on the university website about the USS, the development of the items, detailed analysis of results, comparison to external benchmarks, and so on.

A timeframe for provision of results to Heads of School and Unit Convenors needs to be committed to and made transparent.

The available pdf results breakdown of percentages of responses by school is minimalistic. For example, no overall results for the university are provided, and no means and standard deviations are reported. No other breakdowns are provided (e.g., by Gender; females are generally more satisfied than males, which could partly explain the lower ratings in some schools (which may have greater proportions of males).