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Registry

Student Online Evaluation (SOLE) Survey

The SOLE Process

There are 3 SOLE surveys that take place during the year:

• Autumn SOLE - runs during the last 2 weeks of the autumn term.

• Spring SOLE - runs during the last 2 weeks of the spring term.

• Summer SOLE - runs for 3 weeks in late May/early June and is currently only used by:

  • Department of Chemistry
  • Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
  • Department of Earth Science & Engineering 
  • Department of Life Sciences

The Autumn SOLE and Spring SOLE surveys are particularly large in scope. All undergraduate students are surveyed in SOLE, except for those in Medicine, where only Year 1 students are surveyed in Autumn SOLE and only Year 1 and Year 2 students in Spring SOLE. SOLE surveys students about lecture modules, the lecturers, assessment and feedback. These questions can be seen here.

There are 2 separate surveys that are also run in conjunction with the main SOLE survey:

• SOLE (Business School and Humanities): this surveys the Business School and Humanities modules that students across departments take. This survey has always run in conjunction with the main SOLE survey.

These modules have to be surveyed separately from the main SOLE survey because in the main survey the modules that are linked to each student are determined by the department in which they reside, and they can only be surveyed for modules within that department. For the Business School and Humanities surveys a manual load of the relevant students in to the SOLE database is arranged with ICT. This enables students to be directly linked to the modules that they are taking outside of their department. The same questions are used for these surveys as for the main SOLE survey.

SOLE Results 

Once the SOLE survey has closed the Directors of Undergraduate Study in each department are asked to check the student comments in the SOLE database to see if they would like to remove any comments, then the survey results are published. An email is sent to each individual member of staff that received feedback in the survey, giving details of the responses to along with all the free text student comments. The Directors of Undergraduate Study also have access to these results for all the members of staff in their department. 

For information on SOLE results, including the outcomes of previous evaluations, please see Student Viewpoint.