Dear fellow teachers,
it is just me, or is the number of surveys we are asked to complete about every aspect of our work growing? I get an email from the administration, the professional organizations of which I am a member and the publishing houses whose textbooks I use asking me to complete a survey every couple of days, and if I don’t, there are annoyed and annoying follow-up messages. This is the end of the semester, I have a ton of work to do, and I’m getting very irritated with having to answer yet another bunch of inane questions as to whether I ever get irritated with students or whether I foster high self-esteem in “my learners”.
I don’t remember getting anything like this number of surveys even just a year ago. Is this evidence that people are enamored with the concept of collecting data, even when they have no idea what to do with this data?
Do you get as many surveys? Do you always respond to them? Are you always certain you know what will be done with the results of the surveys, if anything?
The title of the post says “a question”, but it seems like I have many questions. Should I do this as a survey instead? (The last question is a joke.)
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t get this, but a few years ago (in the wake of the horrid and vile Bologna process) we got new unbelievably awful and stupid curriculum guidelines where we’re supposed to outline things like ‘social competencies’ that students are supposed to absorb.
But in Europe universities have largely degraded to a large scale scam meant to keep people off the unemployment rolls for a few years so there’s been a lot of effort at dumbing down the process at every step to keep the students from noticing what’s going on…..
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I think it has just become much easier to create and disseminate surveys, so the temptation is hard to resist for everyone. Even voting on certain items here at UD takes the form of an online survey. (For example, whether to ratify our collective bargaining contract was voted on via SurveyMonkey.)
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It’s not just you, I have noticed it too. As David noticed, surveying is a cheap way for administration of all sorts to pretend like they are gathering data, not that they do anything useful with it anyway.
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Between the time I wrote the post and now I received two more surveys. Ridiculous.
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Wait…I’m confused. What are my options for answering this question? I “strongly agree” but you didn’t specify a scale–so do I click the “1” or the “5”? And where? I no longer remember how to give my opinion on anything unless I’m clicking a number from 1 to 5. Can you repeat the question?
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I was on a committee that sent out a survey (not my idea, and I did not write it) and then had to tabulate results. They were very disappointed in these, as opinion was not what they had hoped. So they ignored the survey.
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The outside world believes that academics are not being held sufficiently accountable, and are not being efficient. So they are asking us to produce more and more reports. Of course, these reports are about as factual as a report from a Soviet factory manager telling Moscow that they are meeting all of the quotas in the Five Year Plan. But still, they are reports. They prove that we are being held accountable.
Of course, compliance and reporting takes time, so administrative staff are hired, and some select faculty are given release time to focus on this administrivia. So the institution becomes more bloated. And then the outside world says “Wow, look at all that bloat! You guys need to be held accountable!”
So we get to write even more reports.
I will start replacing “Strategic Plan” with “Five Year Plan” and see if anybody notices. Maybe learn a few Russian words and slip them in from time to time.
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The outside world believes that academics are not being held sufficiently accountable, and are not being efficient. So they are asking us to produce more and more reports. Of course, these reports are about as factual as a report from a Soviet factory manager telling Moscow that they are meeting all of the quotas in the Five Year Plan. But still, they are reports. They prove that we are being held accountable.
Of course, compliance and reporting takes time, so administrative staff are hired, and some select faculty are given release time to focus on this administrivia. So the institution becomes more bloated. And then the outside world says “Wow, look at all that bloat! You guys need to be held accountable!”
So we get to write even more reports.
I will start replacing “Strategic Plan” with “Five Year Plan” and see if anybody notices. Maybe learn a few Russian words and slip them in from time to time.
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