Update March 25: The gradSERU survey has been postponed to academic year 2020–21.
The Graduate School is developing a comprehensive new data strategy designed to promote and enhance evidence-based decision making and provide insights for program development and innovation. A vital component of this strategy is direct feedback from students. Over the years, the university has periodically surveyed graduate students on a number of topics.
In an attempt to better coordinate and standardize the information gathering, the Graduate School has recently joined the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium.
The SERU Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities, policy researchers, and scholars who collaborate on the generation of institutional, comparative and longitudinal data on the student experience in research universities. Consortium members utilize the online census survey gradSERU, a comprehensive, longitudinal study designed to examine students' experiences across the entire spectrum of their graduate career: academic, research, teaching, professional development, well-being and sense of community.
On April 1, Graduate School Dean Scott Adler will be emailing the link to the gradSERU survey to all graduate and professional students. The link will be live through April 30. In addition to the core questions, the survey includes supplemental questions, provided by UGGS and other campus partners, which are of particular concern to CU Boulder graduate students and graduate programs.
CU Boulder graduate and professional students will be invited to participate in the gradSERU survey in academic year 2020–21. The survey will be distributed via an email from Graduate School Dean Scott Adler. For more information, please contact the Graduate School at gradinfo@colorado.edu.
Through its administration every other year, the Graduate School expects that the gradSERU survey will be an on-going means of tracking changes and improvements in academic programs and the utility of various support services.
“The data from this survey will be critical to understanding what our current graduate students need to thrive here and how we can help them to prepare for their professional careers,” said Adler. “In addition, one of the great advantages to using the SERU instrument is the ability to see how our programs and departments stack up against similar units at peer universities.”
By utilizing such a comprehensive survey instrument, Adler sees the gradSERU survey as replacing a number of prior surveys conducted by the graduate school and other entities on campus. The Campus and Workplace Culture survey will still be administered by the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC), including one in 2020, to assess academic and workplace culture, incivility, protected-class harassment, discrimination and sexual misconduct.
