How the University of Huddersfield went from 12% to 67% MEQ response rates – and made it stick

The University of Huddersfield has built a reputation as a teaching-focused institution committed to the practical, hands-on development of its students. That commitment extends to the continuous improvement of the student experience at the most granular level: the individual module. For the School of Computing and Engineering, meaningful student feedback is not a regulatory checkbox but the primary evidence base for academic decision-making. Without representative data, module leaders cannot know with confidence what is working, what is not, and what changes will make a genuine difference to the students in front of them.

The Challenge

For several years, the School of Computing and Engineering tested different approaches to module evaluation in search of a system that would generate meaningful response rates. Paper-based surveys once produced reasonable returns but created a significant administrative burden, requiring staff to process and record hundreds of individual forms by hand. The move to online delivery addressed those efficiency concerns, but response rates declined steadily with each passing year.

The most recent arrangement used a survey tool embedded within the University’s virtual learning environment. Despite that integration, response rates fell as low as 2% on individual modules, settling at an average of 12% across the School in the year before the Unitu pilot. 

At that level, the data was, in the words of the School’s Student Experience Officer, effectively unusable: academics were rightly unwilling to make changes to their modules on the basis of feedback from so few students. The situation had reached a critical point, with the School considering abandoning module evaluations altogether in favour of annual course-level surveys.

The Solution

Rather than lose module-level insight, the School of Computing and Engineering chose to pilot Unitu’s module evaluation tool, MEVA. Josh McKeown, Student Experience Officer within the School, led the implementation on the ground, coordinating both the technical setup and the staff engagement required to make the pilot a success.

From the outset, the project was built around close partnership rather than a simple software rollout. Weekly check-in calls in the lead-up to launch ensured that both the School and Unitu were clear on deadlines, data requirements, and responsibilities. The questionnaire was designed in partnership with the School, ensuring it reflected the University’s specific needs rather than relying on a standard template. Early technical work focused on securely extracting the correct student data from the University’s systems and transferring it to Unitu, a step that required careful coordination but was resolved before launch.

The primary channel for reaching students was personalised emails, each containing direct links to relevant module evaluations and carefully designed to reflect the student experience within the School at that point in the academic year. Staff also displayed QR codes in teaching sessions and worked to build awareness of the survey period in advance, so that when emails arrived students were already primed to act. Unitu monitored response rates actively throughout the window, flagging gaps between reminder emails and helping the School slot in additional prompts where momentum needed a push.

Before the survey window opened, Unitu worked with the School to configure a Power BI dashboard tailored to the metrics that mattered most to Huddersfield — response rates and average scores from Likert questions, filterable by department, programme, and individual module. Crucially, the dashboard was live from the first day of the survey promotion, not delivered as a static report weeks after the survey closed. Module leaders and staff could log in and track responses in real time as they came in. For a School that had previously received data it considered unusable, the ability to watch representative feedback build in real time carried significant meaning. As Josh noted, colleagues who were already comfortable with Power BI and data tools found the experience particularly compelling — the familiarity of the format removed the last barrier between the data and the people who needed to act on it.

The Impact

The School had set itself a target of 25%, reasoning that one in four students responding would constitute a minimally representative sample. That target was reached within the first week of the pilot, prompting what was described as “shock and disbelief” before the figures were verified. Response rates continued to rise steadily, reaching 67% by the end of the collection period. Of all responses received, 86% came through the personalised email link, confirming the School’s existing understanding that email, when well-timed and clearly signposted, requires the least friction for a student to act on.

Students themselves noticed the difference. Informal conversations with Josh revealed that they appreciated how easy the process was: a single click from their inbox took them directly to each evaluation they needed to complete, and the brevity of each survey meant the whole task took only a few minutes. The absence of complaints, in a context where technical difficulties would normally generate a flood of student contacts, was itself read as a signal that the experience was working.

For staff, the increase in response rates transformed the value of the data. Module leaders, who had previously struggled with low or unusable response volumes, now had access to consistent, representative feedback across all modules. The School developed internal guidance to help module leaders both reflect on their results for their own professional development records and draft meaningful responses to students, ensuring the feedback loop was closed properly rather than acknowledged with a generic reply.

The shift extended to the Student Experience Officer’s own role. Module evaluations, previously a process that generated little usable data and attracted limited internal attention, became a meaningful part of the School’s quality improvement cycle. The School now had the evidence base to compare modules, identify where students were less satisfied, and develop action plans grounded in what students had actually said.

The Result

The headline number from the pilot is a 55 percentage-point increase in response rate — from 12% to 67% — achieved in a single term. Term 2 delivered 64%, with the second cycle running more smoothly as the setup, data extract, and promotional approach were already in place. What began as a pilot had become a repeatable, embedded part of the School’s quality cycle. That figure represents more than a statistical improvement. It changed what the data could do. For the first time, the School held module-by-module feedback that was genuinely representative, giving module leaders the evidence to reflect meaningfully on their own teaching practice and giving school leadership the ability to identify patterns across courses that would not have been visible at 12%. With Meva handling promotion through automated and personalised emails, Josh eliminated an estimated full day of scheduling and in-class visits per survey cycle — time previously spent retrieving timetables, coordinating lesson visits, and travelling between classrooms across campus.

The School acknowledged that closing the loop on that volume of feedback took longer than it should have — around six to seven weeks. In the second term, with clearer internal processes already established, the School worked to bring that closer to its three-week target.

The School is also planning a fuller annual programme using MEVA with a cross-team planning session provisionally scheduled for the summer to set a year-round calendar of student voice activity. Two consecutive terms above 60% have given the School the confidence and the institutional evidence to treat module evaluation as a permanent, embedded part of its quality cycle rather than an experiment. 

Conclusion

For institutions weighing whether to change their approach to module evaluation, the School of Computing and Engineering’s experience offers a clear steer. The risks of staying with a system that produces unrepresentative data are, as Huddersfield’s near-decision to abandon module evaluations altogether illustrates, greater than the risks of making a change.