What to Expect - Students
Nearly all of your GVSU courses will have LIFT evaluations, generally during the week or two before final exams. Departments and professors have some flexibility in LIFT schedules, so all of your LIFT notifications may not come at the same time. For courses with small enrollments (such as independent studies), the department may choose to not offer LIFT surveys to students. For courses that are team-taught, departments may choose to ask students to review only some of the faculty involved. If you're uncertain of whether you'll have a LIFT evaluation or feel you may have missed out on the notifications, please consult with your instructor.
For each LIFT evaluation, you will receive an email invitation (from "LIFT via IASystem") as soon as the LIFT survey opens. The email will contain the link to the questionnaire, which you can complete on a phone, tablet or computer.
You will need to log in using your GVSU ID and password to access the survey. This prevents people from submitting feedback about courses they're not in, but information about your identity is not kept with your response data, and no one at GVSU can identify which responses were sent by which student.
Please pay attention to which course's LIFT you're completing! Each page of the survey states which course and professor you're evaluating. Once you click "submit" on the last page of the questionnaire, you cannot go back to adjust your responses.
Students who have not submitted their responses may receive up to three reminder emails for each open LIFT survey.
Your Confidentiality
Your personal identity information is never attached to the content of your LIFT response on any record that is accessible to anyone at GVSU, including your instructor. This protects your confidentiality, but it also means that it's impossible to retract or edit an evaluation once you click the final "submit".
In addition, professors won't see any results from the evaluation until after they have turned in student grades, so it's not possible for the content of the evaluations to influence the grades they give.
If you are in a very small course section, it might be possible for the instructor to know or deduce which responses came from which students. In those cases, the department has weighed it's own need to evaluate the work of the faculty member against the risk to individual students' confidentiality, and determined that the survey is necessary. If you are concerned that you cannot accurately express your evaluation of a course without fear of reprisal, then you should not complete the LIFT survey for that course. You also have the option of contacting the chairperson of of the department to convey your opinions or experiences.
