Graduate Careers Australia
ergo - Number 90 March 2003
The Online Graduate Destination Survey
Following two years of development and trials, the GCCA is about to make available an online Graduate Destination Survey questionnaire. This will of course incorporate the Course Experience Questionnaire and the Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire.
The ‘online GDS’ (oGDS) will be housed on the gradlink web site and will be tested by a limited number of universities for the April 2003 round of surveys before it is made available to all institutions for the October 2003 and April 2004 rounds.
We expect that the oGDS, which is easy to access and use, will assist survey managers to increase their response rates, particularly those for overseas students and Australian graduates who are out of the country at survey time. There is also the potential for cost savings in terms of the printing and distribution of paper survey forms as well as for data entry.
The oGDS is ‘smart’, skipping questions that the respondent does not need to see. For example, if graduates indicate that they are not in employment, they will not see unnecessary employment-related questions. Those who are not in further study will not see questions relating to this aspect of post-graduation activities.
Security has been uppermost in oGDS development and each user institution will be given a set of unique access codes to enable their graduates to respond online. This will ensure that only members of the current survey population can access the online questionnaire, and that they can do so only once.
A small number of universities have been using their own version of an online GDS form for a few years now, and they have enjoyed considerable success. The oGDS will make this tool available to all institutions.
Bruce Guthrie
Research Manager, GCCA
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