Tim Young (Queen Square Institute of Neurology)

10 minute talk

The annual Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is the key collator of postgraduate student views, yet nationally participation is typically below 30% making interpretation challenging. Our distance-learning Clinical Neurology course experience, with some 80 students, demonstrates how to dramatically improve participation
Our course 2017 PTES participation was 14% despite repeated email requests. In 2018 I showed that bespoke personalised requests massively increased participation to nearly 68%.

However, my bespoke method was too time-consuming and thus inapplicable to larger courses.
Without input from me in 2019 our course PTES participation was 20%, reflecting the national average.

In the 2020 PTES I demonstrated a rapid method of mail merge request, personalising the email subject-line using outlook offline, dramatically expanded participation. Starting just 5 days before PTES deadline, I increased our MSc/Diploma student participation from under 3% to 45%-this would have been 50% had I started sending requests 12 days before the deadline.

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