Pres 2017 — An Overview Of Changes To The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey
Pres 2017 — An Overview Of Changes To The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey
The HEA’s biennial Postgraduate Research Experience Survey is the largest national survey of PRG students and has become increasingly popular. In 2015 over 120 institutions took part and over 50,000 PGR students responded to the PRES.
The survey consists of around 40 questions covering many areas of concern to PGR students and their universities or institutes, including their experience with supervisors, resources, research skills and research culture.
For the next national survey in February to May 2017, the HEA have produced an updated questionnaire after a recent consultation exercise. Although the questionnaire will largely be the same in 2017 (with a few more items related to Professional Doctorates and a pilot Wellbeing section), a number of changes are being made to how the PRES will be run and how the data is to be handled.
Arguably, the biggest change will be that, in response to feedback, the PRES will become an annual survey from 2017 — though it is yet to be determined whether the alternate year’s version will contain all the questions of the full survey.
One of the key issues for PRES has been fears that the data will be used to create league tables of PGR satisfaction. In the past, the HEA PRES terms and conditions have prevented institutions from making public benchmark comparisons of their data. From 2017 this will change and the sector-wide and sub-sector benchmarks will be made available publically.
The consultation also generated a number of suggestions for the future of PRES that will be explored in detail for the new PRES 2018.
This article was written by Dr Darren Van Laar, Chair of the Deans and Directors of Graduate Schools Network and Director, University of Portsmouth Graduate School
