Save Our Students from Assessment Fatigue

After our students have finally shaken the last case of the flu, stopped passing around the most insidious stomach bug, healed from the rare case of the shingles, and recovered from the common cold, another epidemic breaks out on campus every year: assessment fatigue. Assessment fatigue spreads rapidly. There is no known antidote. Symptoms include selective blindness to emails containing surveys, indifference to providing opinions, and immunity to the enticement of even the most seemingly irresistible incentives. Every year we are left scratching our heads and wondering what we can do to cure our students from this terrible affliction.

As much as I hate to admit it, the spread of this rampant condition is at least partially our fault. We desperately want to know the opinions of our students on a wide range of topics including but not limited to: residence halls, late night programs, leadership opportunities, wall calendars, community service events, campus traditions, and interfaith engagement. The list goes on and on. Before we know it, there are five surveys planned to go out all within a few weeks of each other. And that is from our Student Affairs Division alone. It may be fair to say that our survey addiction directly causes the assessment fatigue experienced by our students.

So, how can we cure both our addiction and the epidemic that it inflicts on our students? In the past year, we have taken some steps toward finding a cure. First, we eliminated the evaluations that we used to distribute after every late night or weekend program. These evaluations contained just a handful of questions that helped us to determine the quality of the program and whether we should plan the program again. However, the majority of our students despised filling out the evaluations, the data we collected from them wasn’t particularly useful since they weren’t thoughtfully completed, and we realized that student attendance and observations at the event could provide us with the information we were seeking.

We have also focused on combining surveys and collaborating with other departments in order to send out fewer surveys overall. In some instances, we are able to add our survey questions to campus-wide annual surveys. If we are going to add questions to an annual survey, we are typically limited to just a few questions. As a result, we are forced to think critically about the wording and meaning of the questions as well as what we expect to learn from asking the questions. Thoughtful consideration of whether the questions asked will truly provide helpful data is crucial. Though these considerations may sound elementary, survey bloat is a widespread issue. We shouldn’t ask a question unless we actually have a clear idea of what we will do with the result. We must think critically about how we plan to utilize the data that we are so desperate to collect.

We have taken some steps toward saving our students from assessment fatigue but we still need your help. Do your students also suffer from assessment fatigue? When you remind them to complete a survey, do they reach for support from a nearby wall or desk as their eyes glaze over? What does your institution, office, or department do to decrease the amount of surveys distributed and increase the participation of said surveys? Does your institution use any kind of creative or innovative forms of assessment? Let us band together to stop assessment fatigue once and for all.