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Surveys
Overview
Current Surveys (to take a survey)
Past Surveys
Survey Resources (to learn more about conducting surveys)
To learn more about IAS Surveys, see the overview below. If you are here to take a survey, go to Current Surveys. To find out more about past surveys IAS has conducted, including descriptions of the surveys, survey questionnaires, data, reports and methodologies, go to past surveys. If you are looking for advice or assistance about conducting a survey, IAS has compiled tools and links on its Survey Resources page. If you cannot find what you are looking for, please go to Data Support.
Overview
IAS has written dozens of questionnaires surveying tens of thousands of faculty, students and alumni since the office was established in 1988. The overall purpose of these surveys is the same—to improve undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Virginia. The first surveys were paper questionnaires sent through the mail. Data entry was done by hand. In 1990, IAS began offering respondents the choice of paper or completing a survey on a computer diskette, which was also mailed out but eliminated the costly and error-prone data entry step. In 1999, IAS began offering students the opportunity to fill out questionnaires on the World Wide Web. Many students preferred this method over diskette or paper. IAS initially continued to offer diskette and paper questionnaire options but, as the web's use increased, students and faculty increasingly preferred to answer questionnaires over the web.
While paper and pencil surveys are in some cases still appropriate, today, more than 90% of our survey questionnaires distributed to on-Grounds faculty and students are collected through the web. Paper questionnaires are still offered to alumni. To design and collect our web surveys, we use Inquisite.