Calvin, Ogulcan, Rosa

There are many surveys about student experience at any educational institution. However, most of these surveys are very broad and don’t focus on empowering students to express themselves fully. Most of the time students don’t give the most candid answers and often times they can be quite biased. Our survey aims to identify what aspects of faculty matters the most to students at City Tech and aspects of faculty the school lacks. From the responses, we hope to gain a bigger picture on what students are satisfied with in terms of faculty and what the faculty needs to further improve on.

There were numerous revisions that we went through in order to achieve the correct focus for our survey. In the beginning, our intention was to create a survey purely to evaluate the effectiveness of professors similar to how ratemyprofessor, ratemyteachers or operates. However, the problem that existed was that the feedback and ratings that students give to professors are too, subjective, too general, and the data that we were to receive would not be accurate and would not really want to measure what we intended it to.

Our second revision was focused on student satisfaction on different aspects of the school such as education, faculty and services. However, the problem that we encountered was that there were too many variables to take into account. Therefore, it made the survey too lengthy for students and it was too similar to already existing surveys such as CUNY AIR and the NSSE. We did not want to create an inferior survey that would measure close to the same thing. Another obstacle we encountered with it was that we always asked ourselves what was the purpose? This made it really difficult to proceed with this revision.

Going back to the drawing board for a new direction with our project, we researched on teacher evaluation surveys, what they measure, what they intend to measure, and why they aren’t as effective as they can be, and potential solutions to these problems. What we wanted to do was to create a new version of the City Tech teacher evaluation survey but because of political reasons, were not able to fully pursue it and have it be the main focus of our project.

What we have now is a survey with open ended questions with flexible answers that asks questions that pertain to faculty. How this differs from the original ideas we had is that the questions are much more meaningful, and they are much more specific. What we hope to achieve from the data is to find out what are the more important elements in City Tech for students, aspects in faculty that the school needs and can improve on, and find a trend in the overall satisfaction of faculty.

Moving on to the rationale, we want to know the relationship between students and faculty. Does faculty really have respect for students? Do they affect how you get your education at City Tech? Are faculty there to help you when you need it the most? Each one of our questions will specifically target the faculty and how to improve on it.

The first question asks about the most important thing a student has to city tech? This question is important in our project because this is the introductory part of the survey. It will help connect to the other questions we will ask.

The second question in our survey ask about what matters to you the most about instructional staff at City Tech? This question is important to our survey because it will help us as well as the faculty members to find out what are the strengths and weakness aspects on their staff. This will give an idea on what can the faculty staff improve.

The third question asks the students how does the faculty affect the courses you register at City Tech? This is a huge question because faculty plays a huge role in students academic careers. Students want the right professor for their classes. There are professors who have full respect to students and some have none. Our survey will basically identify the elements behind it.

The fourth question we ask student what they think the faculty lacks? As we already know the availability, promptness, teaching practices as well as good communication with the students  are primary responsibilities of some of the faculty members, therefore the intention with this question is to get a sense of which of those duties needs to be improve and from there figure out ways to make it more efficient.

Our fifth question asks what would students like to see improved about the faculty in City Tech.This question will help us see what is the main issue between students and faculty.

Our sixth question asks how satisfied you are with faculty in City Tech. This question will help us to create a virtual representation and get a comprehensive idea of how students feel about the faculty in general.

The final question will be a question that will ask the student to describe what will be their ideal faculty member. This is the question that will give us the biggest understanding on what aspects are the most important and have the most impact on a student.