Why Use the RISC?

The RISC is the only survey that directly asks students about the problems they face in college

The survey effectively pinpoints more than 80 specific areas where your college can act to improve student success, such as academic advising, course registration, financial aid, online classes, and tutoring. Our unique approach quickly moves students from more general to more specific areas.

For example, if students indicate they had an issue with course registration, they are prompted for more detail:

What issues did you have registering for courses? Please check all that apply.

The amount of detail the survey provides is unparalleled. You will easily identify actions your college can take to move the needle on student success. View our sample institutional report to see for yourself.

The RISC identifies functional areas that excel in helping students succeed in college

Most student surveys ask about satisfaction with functional areas, such as the financial aid office. These results can be difficult to interpret, because students may simply be dissatisfied with the amount of aid they received, not with how effectively the financial aid office processed their aid.

In our focus groups we discovered students want three things when they interact with your employees: staff that are easily accessible, are concerned about helping them, and can effectively resolve their issue. Instead of satisfaction, the RISC asks students to rate functional areas on these three dimensions.

Because functional areas greatly differ by name across colleges, office names are customized for each campus. Simply tell us which five names you would like to use, and your students will see these names when they take the RISC.

The RISC reduces survey burden on students

The typical student survey requires students to plow through dozens of questions. Our unique branching approach allows students to respond only to questions that are relevant to them. For example, students rate functional areas only if they indicate they interacted with the area during the current semester.

The online version of the survey takes students 7 minutes to complete; the in-class version requires a total of 20 minutes of class time.

Students also see the RISC as more relevant than other student surveys. When asked what they thought about the survey during our Fall 2017 pilot, these comments were typical:

Great survey. Asked all the right questions concerning students [sic] education and their environment.
I think these are great questions. I hope you will use the information you gather to make improvements at [deleted].
It wasn't annoying, I didn't mind doing it. It covered a lot of important areas quickly.
This was a good survey, I hope that the information I provided will help to strengthen the college.

The RISC costs $3000 for survey administration

Survey costs do not increase with the number of respondents, so we charge a flat fee of $3,000 per college. This includes administration of the survey, generation of and electronic copies of all reports, and a copy of the survey dataset.

Your campus can add ten additional questions to the survey for only $500. To cover the cost of personalized information sheets for students, there is a fee of $1000 for in-class administration.