Student Feedback Questionnaires (SFQ) is a set of simple questionnaires the University adopts to collect feedback from students about their learning experience in courses they have taken. Different versions have been developed to address the characteristics of the teaching mode used in different sections.

Doing SFQs is actually a student's right and privilege. Hence, it is highly recommended that students should take advantage of this right and fill out the SFQ to let the University knows what they think about their courses. Only students can tell the University how effective a course is for their learning.

Responses from students in the same section are mixed in a pool and no personal information are attached to the data. Thus, an instructor will not be able to find out how a student rated or commented him or her. He or she only has access to the feedback from the class as a whole.

Under the current university regulation, each SFQ survey should be conducted prior to the final examination. This is to prevent the SFQ survey result from being affected by the difficulty level of the examination.

Starting from Fall 2003, students who were found cheating or plagiarizing, the instructor can make a request to exclude the student from participating in the evaluation of the section where the said dishonest behavior took place. This is intended to protect the instructor from retaliation by students accused of cheating and plagiarizing. For requests made based on reasons other than the aforesaid one, they will be considered on a case-by-case basis by the Associate Provost (Teaching and Learning). All such requests should be made to OIR using a standard form on or before week 11. Late requests may not be entertained, especially when the student concerned has already completed and submitted the SFQ.

It is at the discretion of the department whether to let auditing students to evaluate a course. The rationale behind this is that there is quite a lot of variation on the demand made on students auditing a course. If the auditing students are required to participate actively in the course like an enrolled student, they should be allowed to evaluate the course.

This may be because the course concerned lasted for only one week. Students are usually given at least one week to submit their evaluations of a course. In this unusual circumstance, the survey period is usually set by the department offering the course. Once the survey period is set, ASSET will automatically send emails to remind students once every 3 days to encourage them to complete the survey.

After a response is submitted through ASSET, ASSET will place the data from that student into a data pool mixed with the data from other students in that section. Hence it is not possible for the system staff to identify a response from a particular student. The student concerned may consider either informing the department concerned of the incident or send to OIR a correct evaluation of the section, which can be passed to the department anonymously.

Since the SFQ survey is a large scale operation involving over 2000 sections in Fall or Spring term, allowing late submissions will create significant delay in releasing SFQ survey results. Thus, no late-submission will be accepted. However, students may consider sending their comments about the course to the department directly or to OIR, which will then forward the comments to the department anonymously.

The data are stored in a database maintained by ITSC. Details reports are sent to instructors and department heads. A summary SFQ report is made available to students through http://sfq.ust.hk/results/.

SFQ reports which contain aggregate statistics (i.e. department, school and university level) will generally be available about a week after the deadline for submission of course grades. However, a provisional report with no aggregate statistics can be generated by the authorized departmental administrative staff after the survey is completed. Release of both the provisional and official reports to the instructor should be made only if he or she has submitted all the final course grades.