Frequently Asked Questions for the Polar Bear Feedback Team
The Polar Bear Feedback Team (PBFT) is an experimental Bowdoin survey program, run by the Office of Institutional Research, Analytics, and Consulting and sponsored by the Office of Inclusion and Diversity.
Each semester, we will randomly select students to serve as members of the PBFT, who will commit to answering 2 to 3 survey questions on a weekly basis. On average each survey takes 5 minutes or less to complete and for the total semester, each PBFT member’s time commitment will be 60 to 90 minutes.
There is no application; instead, at the beginning of each semester a group of 100 students who are 18 years or older and will stay on campus for the upcoming semester are chosen through stratified random sampling to receive an invitation to join the PBFT. With written consent, these students become the official PBFT members and will be added to a Canvas course designed specifically for accessing the PBFT surveys.
Questions for the PBFT members to respond to on a weekly basis are contributed by key leaders across the College—e.g., Admissions, CXD, IT, Deans in the Student Affairs Office, Associate Deans of Academic Affairs, Communications, and Alumni Relations, so they are Bowdoin-specific and aim to provide feedback on important aspects of student life at the College. Examples include technology use, interactions with faculty, sense of belonging, and alumni engagement.
Most of the questions are either close-ended multiple choice questions, or open-ended questions asking for short written responses. More innovative types of questions such as uploading pictures with descriptive captions will also be incorporated to make survey participation engaging and fun.
Each week, we expect the PBFT members to take about 3 to 5 minutes to submit their survey responses. We understand that there are often other responsibilities in life, so each survey will be available for 72 hours to ensure members have enough time to respond.
Your participation in the PBFT is entirely voluntary, which means you can skip any questions you do not feel like answering and/or exit the team at any time.
Only aggregate data will be shared with leaders across the campus, who are interested in and committed to incorporating students’ feedback in their decision-making. Some results may be published in professional journals or manuscripts and/or presented at professional meetings. Again, no information would be connected to individuals.
Your responses are not anonymous but will be treated confidentially within the research team except to the extent disclosure is required by law or by College Policy. The Office of Institutional Research, Analytics, and Consulting will not disclose your individual survey responses to anyone outside of the project team. All project materials will only be accessible to the IRAC staff on the research team and will be stored on Bowdoin secured file space.
We hope to collect timely and actionable data through PBFT, which will allow us to share some of the results with you and discuss what is being done with the results at the end of the semester.
By participating in PBFT, you are helping leaders at the College gain a better understanding of the student experience and giving the College and departments your feedback and opinions. In return, you will gain inside knowledge about the process of making change in an organization. You will also have the opportunity to practice the life skill of giving honest and constructive feedback. If you are interested in fields such as survey research, market research, user experience, etc. you may even want to add your role on the PBFT to your resume!
After the last survey of the semester is closed, IRAC will review submissions from all the PBFT members and mail a $100 visa gift card to the campus mailbox of PBFT member if they have answered at least 80% of the questions throughout the entire semester.
For more questions about the PBFT, contact Chloe Qian in Institutional Research, Analytics, and Consulting at c.qian@bowdoin.edu.