Last week I posted about the Ofqual survey and this evening I’ve spent some time completing it. I was going to critique each of the questions, but I’ll let you have a look yourself and I think I covered most of my issues with it in my previous post, so let me show you what is really bugging me! Some of the questions have sliders asking you to grade your answers from: far left (1) completely unacceptable to far right (10) completely acceptable

As I was looking at the sliders (say it like the women on the Wonga ad!) it dawned on me that the default position of the “slidey thing” is in position 6, and because there are 10 positions (it doesn’t include zero) if I wanted to “neither agree or disagree” I wasn’t able to … so for questions where I didn’t have an opinion I had to either select 5 or 6. I’ve shown one of the question screens and moved each of the sliders into the  different possible positions (I didn’t submit these responses by the way!) so you can see what I mean (the blank one is position 6):

This is possibly a minor point but it means that for some questions my response is “tending” towards either finding something unacceptable or finding it completely acceptable. Surely this will distort the results? I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to give anyone more ammunition to use against the teaching community, but it does make me doubt the validity of this kind of thing.

So Ofqual if you’re reading this … I’m not sure what Betty, Earl and Joyce will think of your sliders! and whilst you’re at it … I would have liked to have been able to leave a response to certain questions! It really isn’t as simple as saying “yes” I have seen “something” happen, whether I agree/disagree with that “something” … I want to be able to tell you “why” its important too!

If you want to complete the survey yourself the link is here.

**Certainly not one for the “Best survey EVER” award””

*** Does that exist? If not … it really should!!***