We do pretty well here at not over-surveying our students. I have, however, worked at and heard about other places where survey fatigue is not just a theoretical possibility, but an everyday reality.
Surveys are a quick and relatively inexpensive way to gather a lot of information about our students, their experiences, their perceptions, and their desires. They can become too much of a good thing, and it's not a bad idea to think about how we might identify other ways to achieve similar data collection. At the very least we can examine our surveying schedule from a meta-view and determine what would be optimal deployment for the organizational survey resources we simply must use.
My pet peeve: duplicate questions. If I ask you about data that is not likely to change during your tenure with us, do I really need to confirm and reconfirm that datum every survey? There are enough things that do change, and that we need to ask about more than once for that reason.
Most surveys are entirely too long. Some engage too many topics.
We are encouraging more of a point-of-service approach to surveys, in which we gather only very limited, targeted information at the point at which the student is having the experience in question. It works better with their time commitments, minimizes errors of memory in self-reports, and gives us very quick feedback if something is amiss in our operations.
What we have not done, historically, is centralize oversight of surveying to maximize its efficiency and exert quality control over the instruments that are utilized around the college. I would be very interested to hear how other organizations manage their survey processes around these considerations, and any others I may have neglected to address.
