Course Experience Survey
The Course Experience Survey (CES) is SFU’s broadest tool for gathering student feedback on their learning experiences. It is administered in every course, every term, to provide large-scale, consistent evidence. Each year CES collects responses from tens of thousands of students, including over 250,000 written comments, making it one of the largest continuous sources of student feedback at SFU. If you are an instructor or administrator who needs to review CES results, you can find them by navigating to the Data Portal.
Governance
CES data is collected under the authority of the University Act (R.S.B.C. 1996, c.468), the Collective Agreement between the University and the SFU Faculty Association (SFUFA 2022-2025; Article 28) and the Collective Agreement between the University and the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU 2022-2025; Article 20).
Common Core Question Set
The CES includes a common core of questions that all students answer across the university. These cover broad aspects of the student learning experience, such as workload, challenge, clarity, support, and engagement.
Discipline Question Sets
While the common core questions are general and apply to almost every student-course learning context, these questions are asked at a department level, or even for a unique program or subject. If you would like to update or create a discipline question set, please email leap@sfu.ca.
Instructor Question Bank
Instructors can add their own questions to the CE survey and use the results of those questions as they wish. The CES dashboard has an interface where instructors can chose from a bank of pre-made questions or they can create their own.
Context Questions
Context questions are for studying temporally constrained or emerging issues that may be impacting students' learning experiences.