My experience with myExperience

Of the end of term experiences of UNSW students, there is perhaps none more universal than being pestered to complete the myExperience forms. As much as it is seen as a chore by some, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to review what and how the course has been taught, and where it can be improved. Whilst this was intended to be a love letter to myExperience and explaining why it’s underappreciated, I can’t also deny that there are several problems with it.

For starters, it’s optional, which means low completion rates. Scrolling through some of the (simplified) data that’s publicly available here (need UNSW email), the completion rates tend to sit at about 20-30%, only occasionally getting closer to 50% (some are near 100%, but I’m guessing that’s because the lecturer physically got the students to do it). This is not enough to draw meaningful conclusions, especially for courses with only a few dozen students.

On that note, upon opening my surveys for this term I was surprised to see a 3000 character limit on each of the optional extended response boxes, which I do not always remember being there. After digging out a particularly long one I remember writing a bit over a year ago, I found that to be just shy of 4000 characters, or about 700 words. This means they’ve most likely introduced the character limit since then, which is incredibly disheartening to see.

Some will say I’m taking these too seriously, but I will argue there is no real other mass opportunity to provide this level of feedback, and it is not being properly appreciated. The only “mandatory” questions are a few very generalised statements of which you are asked your agreement on a scale of 1 to 6. This data alone is not enough to conclude what specific areas and topics work well, and what needs to be improved, especially the smaller to medium sized things.

Take that 700 word response I mentioned earlier. Overall, that was for a course I generally enjoyed. I would have given most of those statements a 5 or 6. However, there were many minor issues. The lectures often had technical problems. Some of the questions on the assessments were either poorly worded or otherwise broken. The lecture slides had structuring and formatting issues.

There is no other way I could have highlighted these specific issues. There are also likely some other issues I either neglected or didn’t pick up on. As a side note, there is no mention as to how many opted for these optional extra responses, but I suspect it is not many. Given its usefulness, I encourage people to write something here.

Another of my issues is how the myExperience system itself is implemented, the first of which is that I find it closes too soon. A couple of times now I’ve been very critical of a course, but by the time the form opened at the end of term, I forgot some of my major complaints. I would love it if the form was open from the start, just not having the “submit” button until the end of term. More annoyingly, however, there is no