If you’ve spent even a semester at Kirkwood Community College, you know that a wide margin of school emails are survey requests. Survey requests are often repeated every three to five days until a student fills out the survey or it expires.
Often, these are course surveys, surveys from different Kirkwood organizations, student surveys, surveys from our advisors, and even surveys from the Department of Education or the City of Cedar Rapids.
After polling a small number of students at Kirkwood, we found that some students have received up to 16 survey request emails this semester alone, with the current total of surveys in a student’s inbox being somewhere between 44-72, depending on how long they’ve been at Kirkwood.
Kirkwood should consider limiting the proportion of surveys they send to students. Not only is it annoying, but studies show that survey fatigue can actually lead to lower response rates.
According to HubSpot, survey fatigue is when a possible respondent loses interest in a survey. There are many causes of survey fatigue, which may range from the number of survey requests, the number of questions on a survey or the amount of effort a survey takes.
A research project at the University of New Mexico studied the correlation between lower respondent rates and survey fatigue, specifically when a participant is receiving multiple survey requests at a time. One experiment done studied the response rates in a senior survey. One group of seniors were sent two surveys, while another group was sent only one. The experiment found that the response rate of students who received two surveys was 57%, while students who received one survey had a respondent rate of 67%. One experiment found that this rate decreases further the more surveys that are requested, from a 68% response rate to 46% on the third survey.
Research from HubSpot found that surveys begin to lose 15% of responders once a survey hits the three-minute mark and 40% at the nine-minute mark in a survey. Additionally, the University of Mexico only had a respondent rate of 28% on their CSEQ, a seven page questionnaire.
There’s no doubt that surveys are important. Kirkwood Community College’s office of Institutional Research publishes research reports on Kirkwood’s website that anyone can view. These results are based off surveys that the IR hosts, including frequent Kirkwood student surveys. These published reports include information on Kirkwood’s diversity, demographics, economic impact, student engagement, student achievement and consumer information. These reports provide information to both Kirkwood and students to help them make informed decisions on their future.
However, the college should consider survey fatigue and limit the number of survey requests sent to students, not only because it’s exhausting, but because it may lead to higher response rates and more accurate information. It would greatly benefit both students and the college if Kirkwood would decrease the number of survey requests and the time it takes to fill out a survey.
Categories: Opinion, Staff Editorials
