How can LimeSurvey handle this?

We have cohorts of a students who each work with multiple professors the professors need to provide feedback on each student. so say 10 professors need to fill in a survey about each (12-15) students.

The professors don't change each year but the students do.

I tried on the trial version but it looks like you need to create a survey, add participants, tokens etc and repeat for 12-15 students, you can copy a generic survey template but you have to add participants.

Why can you not add multiple people to multiple surveys? Am I missing something here or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

To understand:

There are (let's say) 10 fixed professors who rate their students.
So there are 10 people who use the survey.
And the questionnaire is always the same.

The survey could be like this:
1. question: Prof enters his ID, name or whatever unique
2. question: Prof enters ID, name or whatever unique of the rated student.
3.-n. question: the questionnaire to rate them.
In your analysis you have a unique relation of prof, student and data.

You do not need tokens (but can use them).
If each professor has a unique ID, which he enters in the first question, you can screenout anybody who enters something else (in case the link to the survey got known to others)
If you want to use tokens, each professor will get one.

In case the questionnaires are different for each professor, you can use the ID to display only the questions that are applicable to this professor. (or in case you use tokens you can add a TOKEN_ATTRIBUTE)

Anyway, this can be solved with only one survey.
But a little bit more information would be appreciated.

Best regards
Joffm

jarlrmai wrote: Why can you not add multiple people to multiple surveys? Am I missing something here or is there a better way to do this?

You did check that here?
www.limesurvey.org/manual/Central_Participant_Database

Each student works with each of the professors (sometimes not all of them) so the professors need to complete for each student.

At the moment the 1st question is "did you work with this student" selecting no hides the rest of the questions and the survey is over.

The questions are always the same, the student receives a copy of the results for their personal file so we'd the need the results to be grouped for each student they get the PDF and then is added to their personal record.

The problem seems to be if we make it one survey the results will be jumbled so the admin will be difficult but if we make it a survey per student and invite participants this gives us the combined results as in we can just export the results to the PDF, but this then means copying and redoing the participants for each student (12-15 times and more if we add more students)

Why not simply export the tokens from one survey and import them into the other surveys? Importing only takes seconds.

jarlrmai wrote: The questions are always the same, the student receives a copy of the results for their personal file so we'd the need the results to be grouped for each student they get the PDF and then is added to their personal record.

I see no way, how LimeSurvey can do that without external tools. Getting results from different surveys and join them into one report, which then gets redistributed as PDF files.

That is not what is being asked.

We have a survey for student Jon Smith, he has worked with the 10 professors so each of the Professors completes the "Jon Smith" survey then we export the results of the "Jon Smith" survey and give this to Jon Smith for his future record, works fine.

However we then need to repeat this for Dave Brown, Sue Green, Alex White etc.

So with the way it works we need to go into each survey and redo all the participants manually each time.

It just seems there should be an easier way.

Hope this helps.

We have a survey for student Jon Smith, he has worked with the 10 professors so each of the Professors completes the "Jon Smith" survey then we export the results of the "Jon Smith" survey and give this to Jon Smith for his future record, works fine.

I don't think it makes any sense to create a survey per student.

I would create one survey for all students and all professors and handle the results later by calling the database or something like that.

The way you want to do it you have two problems that limesurvey can not do:
1. You can't join results of different responses into one PDF with Limesurvey
2. It is not possible for different people to add to the same response.

So I would go down the same route as Joffm, but knowing that professors can be a little bit confused sometimes I would go for the tokens.

Create one survey with all the questions about students. I am currently assuming that all professors will fill the same questions about all their students. it is also possible to create different questions (e.g. based on different topics, etc), it will just be a little bit more complicated.

Then I would create tokens and I would create the tokens not via Limesurvey, but myself.

Each professor would get an ID, e.g. p001, p002, p003, ..., pXXX.
And each student would also get an unique ID, e.g. s0001, s0002, ..., sXXX.

The token for professor 1 and student 1 would be "p001s0001" and so on. Each professor will receive as many tokens / links as they have students.

This could also be solved with normal tokens and custom attributes for professor and student.

This way it allows you to create only survey that can be used with every professor and every student. I don't think it makes sense to create a survey per student, especially as they will change each year.

Now your problem is, that Limesurvey will not give you automatically the results you want. You would have to access the results table and get the information for each student based on the student ID and create your own script that will generate a result per student (including all the professors' responses).

I know, this is not the answer you wanted, but I don't think it is practical in the long run to create one survey per student to get the joined results for this student.

If you think of using this system for longer, I would go the one survey route with tokens (quickly created each year) and I would invest in a system that can automatically group the results for each student and create a PDF of it, rather than each year copy the survey for each new student.

Thanks for that it seems a little clearer that way

The problem is the Head of Faculty who is also a Prof has to manage this process, and explaining tokens to him would be like him explaining his thesis to me.

And I'll have to also make the process of extracting the results something they can do, this was really stop me having to develop my own survey system.

It just seemed like this was something that wouldn't be that uncommon a request.

How would the prof know which student they were filling in the survey for? Do the tokens get used in the survey text?

How would the prof know which student they were filling in the survey for? Do the tokens get used in the survey text?

You can create custom attributes for the tokens with, for example, the student's name. This attribute can be piped into the survey something like {TOKEN:ATTRIBUTE_1}.

Okay I get it so

custom tokens CSV into survey

Import into 1 survey each year

Send emails

Then sort the results out later.

is there a manual article on custom tokens?

Well, this is something organizational.

If you feel like the Head of Faculty is not able to create this, then we can try to make it simpler.

The tokens can be created one by one in the Limesurvey backend (tedious) or in a spreadsheet for all professors and students.

What you could do is to include the name of the student as a custom attribute as well, which you can access in your survey and show the name of the student to the professor.

This all stands and falls with the abilities of the Head of Faculty. You will need to find something this person is capable to do. But I guess creating a spreadsheet that looks something like in the screenshot should be something doable for a person that achieved to be head of faculty (I know, I know, not always, but let's hope)...

So the head will create a table with this information, export it as CSV and import it as the token table for this survey.



You can create your survey and accessing all these values via the expression manager of Limesurvey e.g. {TOKEN:attribute_1} will give you the value of the custom attribute 1 that you created in the token table.

If attribute 1 is the Students first name and attribute 2 is the students last name, you could write this code into the question texts:

And it would give you something like this in the question text:
"Please rate student Mad Max for overall performance this year:"

The excel is just an example, you would need to format it correctly according to your survey, but it is just to give you an idea of what the person resonsible would have to do.