GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 92 September 2003

New Online GDS System Goes Live

The Online Graduate Destination Survey (OGDS) questionnaire is a new initiative from the Graduate Careers Council of Australia’s (GCCA) survey team being trialled for the October 2003 survey round. It is not intended to replace the existing hard copy Graduate Destination Survey forms, but provides an alternative method of submitting survey responses which will hopefully encourage an increase in overall response rates.

Macquarie University, Deakin University and the University of Adelaide are involved in the pilot project, and several other universities have already expressed interest in using the online form in the future depending on the outcome.

Authenticating Responses
In order to make the authentication of student respondents water-tight with only one response received per student, as well as to ensure that no sensitive or private student information needed to be stored by the GCCA, a new identification system needed to be implemented.

This issue was resolved by the provision to all participating universities of set groups of unique ID character strings, which they would then match to the individual students. This method not only ensures that the GCCA does not hold any confidential student data, but also that there is no need to develop several solutions for student authentication which accommodate inconsistency between the various university systems.

Recently the GCCA has undertaken a significant amount of face-to-face work with the university survey managers and their web development staff to implement the proposed system. Now, providing that the pilot is successful, the GCCA aims to have the system ready for several other universities to use later in the year.