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During the time of studies you will be solicited for many kinds of feedback. After orientation, new students will be asked to complete an orientation feedback questionnaire. In every course you take, you will be asked for course feedback.

The national Finnish Bachelor's Graduate Survey, for its part, gauges the satisfaction level of graduating Bachelor’s students with Aalto and other universities as well as their experiences how well the studies have gone. When you graduate with a Master’s degree, we ask you to fill in the TEK and the Finnish Business School Graduates questionnaire to hear your views concerning the degree and how well studies have gone and also to hear about your work. The career-tracking survey is a questionnaire that yields valuable data on how graduates are faring in the workplace.

As a student, you have the right to ask for feedback from your teacher when you would like to know how to get better results. You can for example ask for advice how you could have gotten a better grade. It is also important that you give feedback to the teachers by answering the questionnaires and sharing your experiences. Some courses have organized student agents who can gather information from students and bring it to the teacher during the course. Consequently, the teacher has a possibility to make changes during the course. With the help of the feedback, we can develop teaching and teaching environment.

Within one month, you will get personal feedback to your email address. The feedback will give you tips for personal development in following areas:

• your learning style and study strategies
• your self-efficacy and commitment
• do you see teaching well planned and aligned, interesting
• do you get enough feedback to support you studies
• do you get support from your peers
• how to deal with difficulties: procrastinating or re-evaluing the situation?
• are you able to be kind to yourself in stressful situations

You will get ideas of the feedback of yours strengths and developmental areas. You will also get tips where you find support for your personal development. Your feedback is confidential, but you can show it to your academic tutor or study coordinator if you wish to talk about it. You can also show it to study psychologist. The study psychologist team is organizing workshops about study skills, stress handling and dealing with difficult emotions.

The summaries of the results regarding each programme will be delivered to the Programme Managers. Together with the course feedback the results will be used for developing the programmes.

All Aalto University schools collect course feedback. Feedback is collected automatically at the end of a course in the form of an end-of-course survey. This survey includes questions common to all Aalto courses as well as questions specific to the school and possibly questions added by the course teacher.  Feedback may also be collected by a teacher during a course.

As a student, you are in a key position to give feedback to the teacher so they can further develop the course and course teaching. Remember to give your ideas and suggestions on both the strengths and the areas for development. The feedback is used also in assessing teaching staff for tenure track and in supporting their career development.
 

Where can I find course feedback?
Course feedback is sent through MyCourses. There are two places where you can give feedback: 1) The ‘Course feedback’ tab on the upper menu bar shows all of the surveys for you to answer, as well as finished surveys for which reports have been published showing student responses to feedback questions and teacher responses to the feedback received; 2) Next to the Syllabus button on the upper right there is a black ‘Course feedback’ button where you can see the feedback survey(s) for a particular course. You can also see if you did not answer a survey that has expired.  

How does course feedback work? 
As a student, you can send direct feedback through the MyCourses surveys. You will get an email reminder about the survey. The end-of-course survey opens one week before and closes one week after the end of the course, unless the teacher extends the time to respond. 

You can respond to the feedback survey only once, and you cannot edit your response afterwards. If you send feedback, your name will be recorded in the list of respondents. This enables teachers to, if they wish, reward students (by giving additional points, for example) for having given their feedback. The system prevents teachers from connecting any particular feedback to the individual student who gave the feedback.

To view feedback, teachers need a minimum number of responses
If less than five students respond to a feedback request, the course teacher will have no access to any of the feedback that was sent. For this reason, students in some small courses are asked for permission to change the limit for teacher access. These students are asked if they want to give consent for processing their feedback even if less than five feedback responses are sent. If permission is given, the teacher can view the feedback of only those students who gave their permission. The feedback of other students will be visible to the teacher if five or more feedback responses were received. 

Please note that the teacher always receives a list of the students who gave feedback – even if less than five did so. The system never shows to the teacher who it was who sent a particular feedback item (though the identity of the student is obvious if they were the only one to respond).

When you send feedback, please keep in mind the following
Remember that course feedback never includes information about a person’s state of health or anything else corresponding to personal data. Therefore, please do not include private, personal or sensitive information in the feedback. To communicate such information, you should use other more appropriate, personal channels. When sending feedback, remember that it should always be given in an appropriate manner and with due discretion. Your feedback makes a difference!

Language versions of the feedback questions
As a student, you can select which language to use for responding to the feedback questionnaire. However, sometimes the feedback questions may be in a different language than the one you selected, for example, if the teacher failed to get the questionnaire completed in the different language versions. If a question is available in more than one language, the language shown will be the first one available in the following order: English, Finnish, Swedish. Please write your responses to open-ended questions in a language that you know the teacher understands. 

Publication of feedback for viewing by students; teacher responses to feedback 
Teachers may publish a report that includes their responses to the feedback they received as well as students’ multiple-choice responses to feedback questions. This report will be visible to only those students who sent in the feedback responses. 

Other uses of course feedback 
According to legislation, Finland’s universities must ‘evaluate their education, research and artistic activities and the impact thereof’ (section 87 of the Universities Act, 558/2009). Course feedback is used particularly for evaluating and developing the quality of teaching and education. For that reason, course feedback is handled not only by teachers, but also by their supervisors and other department managers, programme directors, the heads of majors, working groups for developing the teaching provided through the programmes, the deans and the vice deans, and employees in Aalto’s service operations.
 

For more information: coursefeedback.aalto.fi

This survey concerns how students are faring with their studies in their second and fourth year. The survey will be carried for the first time in 2017. About one month after filling in the questionnaire, students will receive reciprocal feedback, followed by campus events where they can discuss it. Degree programme directors will also be informed of the questionnaire results. The questionnaire consists of parts taken from the HowULearn survey of the University of Helsinki and rounded off with supplementary questions.

For more information, see: 

The Finnish Bachelor’s Graduate Survey is a national student feedback survey. The objective of the questionnaire is to yield information on teaching and learning in different disciplines, and to form as specific an idea as possible of students’ experiences and opinions of teaching and learning.

The survey is based on the HowULearn survey and the questions in the questionnaire are based on research on academic teaching and learning. There are no right or wrong answers. The results will only be examined statistically at the group level. Therefore, the information gathered on individual students will not be monitored or reported.

At the end of the survey there are some questions that were formulated together with the trade unions affiliated with your field of study. We hope that you will respond to these questions as well. The responses you give to these questions will be sent to the unions.

Responsibility for development and implementation of the questionnaire lies with Universities Finland UNIFI.

Aalto University will use the results of the survey to develop its operations. As of 2015, the Ministry of Education and Culture distributes annually 3% (approx. €50 million) of its university core funding based on this student feedback survey.

More information: https://kandipalaute.fi/fi (In Finnish)

Contact address: kandipalaute@aalto.fi 

You can respond to the surveys through this page: /en/applications-instructions-and-guidelines/feedback-surveys-for-students-graduating-with-masters-degree 

Feedback survey of new graduates

Since 2011, Finnish universities and Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland (TEK) have conducted a survey of newly graduated Masters of Science in technology and architecture. The survey encompasses all Finnish university units that provide education in the technology field, reaching almost every recent graduate with an MSc (Tech) or architecture degree. The survey has yielded reliable comparative information about the quality of education in Finnish universities of technology.

The survey is also an inventory of the skill levels of those who will shape tomorrow’s world. It also tells about how well the study system is running, the experiences of alumni in the workplace, the current employment situation and the general level of satisfaction with the degrees alumni have completed. Survey results are put to use in TEK activities in a number of ways, for example, they are factored into education policies and the development of member services (incl. career advice and consultation on salary levels). The universities use the results in developing results-based indicators that are applied to the work of designing the curriculum and evaluating the quality of teaching.

For more on the survey, see:  (in Finnish)

Contact person: TEK analyst Arttu Piri

Feedback survey for MSc (Econ & Bus Admin) graduates 

Aalto University School of Business and the Finnish Business School Graduates organisation gather feedback on study and employment matters from the graduating business students. The responses are handled confidentially and cannot be linked to individual respondents. The feedback given is used to assess university operations and development and to follow the employment rates and salary levels of graduates. 

A summary of survey results is available (in Finnish) from the Finnish Business School Graduates website: 

Additional information: Tanja Nurmi (firstname.lastname@aalto.fi)

Information on the careers of Masters and Doctoral graduates is monitored by universities in collaboration with the national career and recruitment services network Aarresaari. The monitoring has been conducted for ten years with the participation of almost every university in Finland. Master's and Bachelor’s degree alumni are surveyed five years after graduation, while the career placement of Doctoral alumni is reviewed two to three years after graduation.

The goal of the career tracking survey is to generate comprehensive data on the quality of employment of university graduates and on how well an academic education corresponds to the needs of the workplace. The results are used in the planning of teaching, in guidance work and in educational development.

For more information, see: 

Feedback from Aalto students going on exchange or internship abroad is collected through application surveys, evaluation survey (BIZ) and exchange reports. 

Exchange reports can be found through the databases (Reports tab):

Instructions for writing the report: After the exchange | Aalto University

More information about exchange studies: Exchange destinations | Aalto University

Students participating in Erasmus exchange or internship are required to fill out an EU Survey after the exchange. This is an electronic feedback form that is sent automatically by the European Commission to all Erasmus students after their mobility period.