How much does it cost to participate?
Please refer to the
attached document regarding costs.
What kind of information is provided after administration?
Institutions participating in the study will receive an institutional report that includes
- A report on institutional performance on the indicators of effective educational practices;
- A report on students’ participation in high-impact practices
- A report on financial stress
- Mean comparisons and frequency distributions for all questions;
- Respondent characteristics;
- A codebook; and
- Raw data file of students' responses.
Reports will compare the institution’s performance with the overall sample and institutional type, where applicable.
How are the surveys administered?
The surveys are administered electronically via Questback. The student engagement team at UFS coordinates the administration process in cooperation with a designated representative from your institution.
Who has access to institutional reports?
Institutional reports are sent to your institution’s representative. It is the institutional representative’s
responsibility and prerogative to share this report with other stakeholders at the respective institution. No third party, including any other participating institutions, will have direct access to an institution’s results.
Can I compare my data with that of other institutions?
Your institutional report contains your institution’s results, which are compared to the average scores of the other participating institutions in an institutional type’s group, e.g. your results will be compared to the average scores of the other universities that participated in the particular survey administration. You will not be able to compare your results with another single institution, and no other institution will be able to compare their results with your institution individually.
Is there a limit to the number of student participants?
There is no limit to the number of student participants. However, for the sake of fair representations of your institution, we encourage you to aim for about 10% of your undergraduate student population. If an institution wants to analyse sub-populations of students (for example, specific faculties/departments), it is advisable that data should be collected from as many respondents as possible so that each subgroup is adequately represented.
When are the surveys administered?
BUSSE is administrated at the beginning of the academic year, as soon as the students arrive on campus (February/March).
Both the SASSE and LSSE are administered in the third term to students and lecturers (August/September).
The CLASSE can be administered at any time of the year depending on when the lecturer of the module chooses to administer the survey. The only requirement is that the students have been exposed to the module for a certain amount of time, in order to form an accurate opinion about the module.
How long does it take to administer the survey and receive the results?
The surveys take approximately 20 to 40 minutes to complete, depending on the selected survey. The CLASSE results are sent to the designated party within six weeks after the closing date of the survey. The BUSSE and the SASSE-LSSE results are sent to the respective institutions within three months after the closing date of the surveys, as these surveys are part of national administrations.
Can I search for individual student responses in my data set?
Although the institutional report focuses on group trends and the results will only report on group performance and not on individuals, the raw data sent to the institutional representative will contain identification information. It is the responsibility of the representative then to decide with what parties the identifiable data should be shared and where it would suffice to share data without any identification information.