AQIP Examiner Measures Organizational Progress in Quality Improvement

AQIP Examiner is a 25-30 minute on-line survey of faculty and staff perceptions of their institution’s quality — from a continuous improvement perspective. It also serves as an instructional tool, a way to help employees see their organization and their role in it from a process-focused perspective. The feedback results provide a springboard to essential campus-wide discussions answering the questions “what should we tackle next to make our institution as effective as possible?”

Convenient and confidential, AQIP Examiner’s 86 items are arranged in sections:

• Respondent Demographics
• Organizational Perspective
• Effective Processes
• Process Perception; and Measurement
• Performance
• Improvement.

Respondents also can enter their specific comments on all items except demographics. The feedback report that an institution receives not only summarizes employee views, but also includes numerical comparisons with all other institutions that have used the survey. From these comparisons, institutions will be able to discover where employees think their institution currently excels and where the institution has opportunities to improve or redesign processes in order to outperform other institutions.

For institutions not yet in AQIP, the survey provides an excellent tool for beginning discussions of how a process-focused perspective provides an institution with a fresh view of its potential opportunities for improvement. If a Commission-accredited institution has hosted a comprehensive on-site evaluation visit in the last two years, AQIP Examiner alone can serve as the preliminary self-assessment that AQIP requires of applying organizations.

Organizations already committed to quality management can use AQIP Examiner to measure their ongoing progress in improving key systems, and to identify their next potential targets for improvement. AQIP Examiner provides concrete comparisons with peers that allow an institution to recognize gaps between its current performance and the levels it could achieve.

AQIP Examiner costs an institution $650, no matter how many employees take the survey. For $100 more, colleges and universities with institutional researchers who wish to mine the quantified data for more sophisticated relationships can obtain the complete data set of employee responses in a single file, ready for import into SPSS, SAS, Excel, or other analytic programs.

To sample AQIP Examiner, click here and enter "Examiner" as the login ID. AQIP Examiner Order Forms are available in the Self-Assessment section of Downloads (link on the left).