Surveying Students

There are two key student surveys at UNSW. 

myExperience Student Survey

The myExperience survey is an internal survey administered by UNSW.   As stated in our 2025 Strategy: "By 2025, UNSW will be Australia’s global university and a leading research-intensive and teaching-intensive university". One of the best ways of determining how well we are progressing towards this goal is by listening to our students.

The myExperience survey replaced the Course and Teaching Evaluation and Improvement (CATEI)  in S1 2017, and aims to boost student feedback and to create a culture of continuous improvement in learning and teaching. The survey is conducted each teaching period at UNSW.

In the past UNSW students currently received a multitude of institution-wide surveys, both digital and hard copy, from across the University. Response rates were mixed, raising concerns over the validity of the data.

myExperience aims is to improve the quality of ongoing and structured insights from our students during their study with us. This will help us measure student engagement at UNSW.  UNSW now has a survey process that will:

  • Consistently and effectively collect data and leverage this to enhance educational quality and the student experience
  • Improve the user experience for both students and staff
  • Identify, respond to and act on ideas and themes emerging from feedback
  • Improve survey response rates 
  • Effectively provide user-friendly, consistent surveys at the end of each course
  • Identify excellent survey practice and consistently apply this practice across the institution, including clear procedures around collection, analysis and storage of data, and refine the questions we ask students
  • Improve the culture of student feedback by acting on responses to achieve continuous improvement through the Closing the Loop process.This gives valuable information to students about why we gather and store data and how we act on their input.

The implementation of myExperience was managed by a Project team with Governance by the UNSW Student Surveys Project Reference Group.

Project Reference Group

A project reference group was established to ensure the success of the Student Surveys project which implemented the myExperience survey. The group meet regularly to provide input and guidance to the project.

Project Sponsor

Professor Merlin Crossley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education

Project Reference Group

  • Rachel Abel, General Manager, DVCE - Chair
  • Martina Lavin, Executive Officer, Campus Life and Community Engagement
  • Sandy Kinch, Policy Manager, DVCE
  • Mark King, Director of Educational Delivery Services, PVCE
  • Sonia Powell, Deputy Director, BRIDG
  • Tom Davey, Student representative
  • Veronika Roth, Student Life and Learning
  • Melissa Roughley, General Manager, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
  • Chris Tisdell, Associate Dean (Education), Science
  • Annie Thompson, Project Officer, DVCE
  • Lorenzo Vigentini, Academic Developer, PVCE
  • David Waters, Senior Business Intelligence Consultant

Project Management

The project was supported from the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education. The project team included representatives from the Office of the DVCE, BRIDG and the IT Project Management Office. The Project Manager was Rachel Abel, General Manager, Office of the DVC Education.


QILT (Qualtity indicators for learning and teaching) Surveys

The other key student survey is the Student Experience Survey (SES) which is one of the suite of QILT surveys which are administered externally to UNSW by the Social Research Centre funded by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training. The SES survey is conducted once a year usually during August.

The SES is the only comprehensive survey of current higher education students in Australia. Around 178,000 first and later year undergraduate students from Australian universities and non-university higher education institutions (NUHEIs) participated in the 2016 SES. The survey is designed to collect information that will help both higher education institutions and the government improve teaching and learning outcomes, and reports on multiple facets of the student experience.

The other QILT surveys are the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) and the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ). You can read more detailed information about the surveys and survey results on the QILT website.