Students or staticians: Survey says students are frustrated with required research

Every year UNC students experience the familiar pleading Facebook, GroupMe or email request to take a survey for class.

Many classes at UNC — a research institution — have a research requirement in which students are required to participate in surveys for a grade, while other classes are centered around data and polling, requiring students to create surveys and reach out to peers for responses.

Students in Lois Boynton’s Media Ethics class have to complete surveys to fulfill this requirement for five percent of their final grade.

Boynton said this requirement shows students the value of research, especially if they will be conducting it in their future careers.

“From the other perspective it also allows the people who are doing the research to have access to people who can give them their views,” Boynton said.

Boynton said while some of her students find the surveys they participate in to be interesting, the majority see it as another hurdle to jump.

“Is it the most powerful thing in the world as an educational tool? I don’t know,” she said. “I would guess based on some of students’ responses, they don’t think so. But when the dots are all connected, some of them are, ‘oh, I get it.’”

Sophomore Tara Nath said her BUSI 406: Principles of Marketing class has a research requirement, and she doesn’t see the connection between the requirement and her class.

“I understand why it’s necessary and it’s an easy grade so I’ll do it, but sometimes it seems unnecessary and I don’t want to do it,” she said.

For other students, surveys are more than just five percent of their grade. They have to design and interpret surveys for data-centered classes, like in Amy Sentementes’ POLI 209: Analyzing Public Opinion class.

In Sentementes’ class, students use Qualtrics software to create public opinion surveys on political issues and are usually required to get between 200 and 250 responses to their surveys.

Sentementes said her students learn a lot through these surveys because they are mimicking the entire research process that political scientists who do survey research go through.

“They learn about what does sometimes happen in the real world when getting responses, when people don’t want to give them to you, get bored, exit the survey — it’s a learning experience for that,” she said.

Senior Karthik Sundaram, who had to make and market surveys in his BUSI 505 class, said it can be difficult to get respondents — which is where the social media requests come into play.

“Whether it’s the sample of people that you’re getting or the kind of responses you’re getting, I think it’s hard to feel like you’re getting what you want to out of data,” he said. “But I think that’s probably a consistent problem whether you’re a student or statistician.”

After personally messaging friends to participate, Sundaram said he still finds it hard sometimes to get useful responses to these required surveys, and he and his classmates have discussed whether these surveys are useful.

“It’s kind of busy work in the sense that you wanna just do it so your professor thinks that you’re putting in that time that you need to, and that you’re putting in that effort,” he said.

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