The AMS is asking for student feedback on its services.
On November 17, the AMS launched its first annual Student Experience Survey (SES) in order to better understand how to improve its services for students. Those who fill out the survey — which is open until December 3 — are eligible to win one of 45 VISA gift cards that have a total value of $500.
The SES is similar to the Nest + Experience Survey launched by the AMS in 2019, with around 50 per cent of the questions being transferred from the previous survey. The AMS initially planned to launch the SES last academic year but, because of COVID-19, it decided to wait for more students to return to campus before launching the survey.
“The survey is technically led by my office, but really it was worked on by the Executive Committee. The survey was also shared with all of our senior managers, they all gave feedback on the survey because it also affects their department,” said AMS President Cole Evans. “It was an organization-wide effort to get the questions done.”
Evans described the SES launch as a smooth process, and he did not hear about any instances of user issues.
He is especially interested in looking at how students responded to questions in the SES about AMS leadership, as well as questions about services and events, because these are aspects of the AMS that directly affect the student body.
“I think we have close to 2,000 responses on the survey, so we’ll get lots of good data,” said Evans. “The AMS is a huge organization, but we wanted to keep the survey within the 15-minute time frame to get those good completion rates.”
Following a model similar to previous years, the AMS plans to use the SES results to develop various reports and recommendations that will most likely be finalized by next February or March.
The SES is part of an annual survey strategy by the AMS in which it will send out the SES during the first term of each school year and the Academic Experience Survey (AES) during the second term of each school year.
“We’re always looking to improve our student engagement, we’re looking forward to elections and referendums so students can have their say on a couple of big aspects about the AMS,” said Evans. “Also of course, continuing to advocate for students, we’re definitely wanting to make sure we continue to be at the forefront of advocacy.”