A few months ago, AACSB released its 2017–18 iteration of the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) to all of our educational members, and last week was the official final deadline for submission. Currently, over 760 schools have submitted their responses to the BSQ, and we are working with more than 250 additional schools to complete their surveys in time to be included in our annual data reports.
While AACSB’s DataDirect system has been around since 2004, we have been collecting data about business schools since 1968, when we launched the Salary Survey for the first time. In 2001, we added the survey that became the BSQ once the DataDirect system was in place. Within the past 10 years, our suite of annual surveys has grown to include several spinoff BSQ modules on topics for which many schools desire more detailed information. These include the Finances Module, the Employment Modules, and the Expanded Data Module, as well as surveys on collaborations and Innovations That Inspire. As a result, DataDirect has become the most comprehensive database on business schools in the world!
None of this growth would have been possible without the help of AACSB’s members and their commitment to submitting valid and reliable information to our surveys, and we want to thank all of our members for their time and their ongoing support of the global business education community.
Now that the data have been submitted, it’s time for AACSB’s Business Education Intelligence (BEI) team to review each survey to make sure that the data are valid, reliable, and, most of all, complete. While we do have validation processing rules programmed within the survey submission system, we also read through each submitted survey to be sure that the qualitative information is appropriately entered, and to catch subtle discrepancies that may be overlooked by our programmed validation.
We realize that our members’ time is valuable and that the BSQ is quite extensive. This year we have taken steps to minimize the number of validation issues our members might encounter by providing more BSQ tutorial webinars (available in the DataDirect Users Group on the AACSB Exchange) and a BSQ Common Validation Guide (available in DataDirect under Downloads ⇒ DataDirect Tutorials and Guides ⇒ BSQ Common Validation Issues.
In addition, we have changed the way we communicate our concerns regarding your survey submission by including validation comment boxes in each section of the survey. This way, the information you need regarding your survey validation is available within the survey itself when you go back to make corrections.
By having a data validation comment box for each section of the survey, we can more clearly communicate any concerns regarding your survey.
Many of our members may receive an email from a BEI team member asking to clarify or correct certain items in the survey. If your school receives such an email, please take the time to review our feedback in the data validation comment boxes. Because of this extra step we take to ensure accuracy, our members can feel confident that any data from our platform are valid and reliable when used for benchmarking and research. We want to be sure that our members’ experience with the DataDirect survey submission process is a positive one, and we will work to make even more improvements in the future.
Please feel free to contact us with any suggestions or questions you may have at [email protected].
Comments