When Institutional Metrics Change

In academic administration, reporting requirements evolve. Institutional research offices update performance indicators, faculty committees modify review standards, and provost offices request multi-year trend comparisons based on groupings that did not exist when older surveys ran.

A Midwestern university approached SurveyDIG support with this challenge: they needed to regenerate yearly aggregate faculty evaluation results across multiple prior terms, but their evaluation rubrics and grouping metrics had changed since the surveys closed.

In many survey tools, recalculating historical data with new grouping criteria requires custom database scripts or difficult data exports.

A Practical Solution via Full-Text Search

Dynamic reporting workflow: cross-term section matching and multi-year aggregate calculation via search indexing
Dynamic reporting workflow: cross-term section matching and multi-year aggregate calculation via search indexing

Rather than rewriting database tables or building one-off migration scripts, SurveyDIG used the built-in Full-Text Search Engine.

By using existing indexed metadata fields within the Evaluation Results reporting tool, administrators can aggregate instructor-level results on the fly:

How the Process Works

  1. Global Search: Administrators search by professor, course number, or department along with a term or calendar year identifier (for example, searching by professor name and calendar year).
  2. Cross-Term Matching: The search engine immediately pulls up every course section, lab, and cross-listed class taught by that instructor across the entire calendar year.
  3. Course Summary Generation: Selecting Course Summary generates an aggregated report with combined response counts, average scores, and open-ended feedback for the year.
  4. Instant Export: Administrators can export the aggregate directly to PDF or Excel for departmental promotion and tenure reviews.

Software That Adapts to Academic Needs

This approach has run reliably across multiple annual review cycles at the university. Because it relies on standard search indexing rather than custom code patches, it can easily be adapted for other institutions facing similar historical aggregation needs.

Enterprise software should adapt to how universities actually work, rather than forcing administrators into rigid, unchangeable boxes.