INFORMATION ABOUT PRES 2008
The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) is a service made available to all HE institutions across the UK which have postgraduate research students. The first administration of PRES took place between mid-March and mid-May 2007 and currently we are inviting institutions to take part in PRES 2008. The second administration of the survey will take place between 1 March and 30 April 2008. PRES is designed to help institutions enhance the quality of postgraduate research degree provision by collecting feedback from current research students in a systematic and user-friendly way. PRES takes the form of an online questionnaire that students are asked to complete. It is based on a survey that was originally developed in Australia (Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire PREQ) and has been used in recent years by the University of Oxford (OPREQ). The Academy has adapted the Australian survey to better fit the UK context, particularly by including additional questions relating to the 2004 QAA Code of Practice: Research Degree Programmes, and increasing the attention paid to skills training and development (in line with RCUK expectations). Development and testing of PRES has been overseen by a Steering Group which includes representatives from RCUK, QAA, HEFCE, UKGRAD, National Postgraduate Committee (NPC), the Higher Education Academy and HEIs. PRES should take no more than about 15-20 minutes to complete. It is based on a standard set of questions seeking their views on a range of things, but it also includes free text boxes, and participating institutions are able to add as many of their own specific questions as they would like to (for example, in order to collect feedback on particular services, initiatives, policies or practices). You can see the standard set of questions on the PRES website http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/research/surveys/pres. The anonymity of all participants is guaranteed. PRES makes use of the Careers Research Online Survey (CROS) methodology, and the online questionnaire is hosted on the Bristol Online Survey (BOS) computer system run by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at Bristol University. Many HEIs will be familiar with CROS, which is used by the sector to collect feedback from post-docs and research fellows. Most HEIs who wish to use PRES will already have a BOS licence. If this is not a case, then an institution that wishes to take part in PRES will need to purchase one. The standard BOS licence, that allows you to do an unlimited number of surveys for 12 months, costs £500 + VAT. It is also possible to buy a single use licence (for use on PRES only, for 1 year) for £250 + VAT. Apart from the BOS licence cost, there is no other charge for participating in PRES. Institutions who decide to use PRES will be able to download their own results for detailed statistical analysis. They will also be able to see and download the aggregate results for all institutions taking part (but not the results from particular HEIs), which will allow benchmarking. The Academy
envisages that HEIs may decide to set up their own benchmarking clubs for sharing results between comparators of their choice. You can see the sorts of results that PRES yields by looking at the dummy report for the University of Poppleton on the PRES website. PRES is not designed or intended to produce league tables from the results. Indeed, quite the opposite, it has been deliberately designed to make such a task impossible because the results remain stored on the BOS file server, the Academy (which is not gazetted under Freedom of Information legislation) will not be able to identify individual institutions in the analysis. Only participating institutions will know which other institutions are involved in the Survey. To participate in PRES institution will need to do three things: o designate a member of staff as the PRES Officer. This person will be the main point of contact with the Academy and ILRT in Bristol, and they will be expected to oversee implementation of PRES within your institution. decide if and how you might wish to personalise the generic PRES questionnaire: the generic questionnaire must be used without modification, and it will yield a great deal of useful information (including comparisons with the aggregate results). But you might also like to add extra questions, which could be in various formats including open text boxes, multiple-choice, or Likert scale. be willing to send an email to all of your research students, inviting and encouraging them to take part in the survey, and pointing them to the online survey tool which they can use. You will also be expected to help maximise return rates among your research students, by sending one or more reminder emails to them.
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The Higher Education Academy is leading the development of this survey for three main reasons - it is neutral (not involved in quality assurance, performance measurement, funding etc), it is national (and thus able to help to identify and share good practice across the sector), and its mission is enhancement-oriented, to serve the sector by offering resources that HEIs can use if they wish to. The Academy anticipates running an event in May 2008 for all institutions who used PRES, in order to share experience and effective practice. The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2007 report is available to download from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/research/surveys/pres and the hard copy can be obtained from publicationmailings@heacademy.ac.uk If you require more information about PRES please contact Gosia Kulej, Project Co-ordinator on 01904717500 or Malgorzata.Kulej@heacademy.ac.uk. If you wish to be the part of PRES 2008 cohort please email surveys@heacademy.ac.uk