20 056 of you

Every suggestion, opinion, or idea can help us improve our project. If you have a suggestion, reach us at prieskum@saavs.sk.

The survey is for all the students on the first (bachelor’s) or second (master’s) level of higher education or enrolled in joint studies (Bc. + M.A./M.Sc. – e.g., medicine studies). It is for students of public, state or private schools as well as for students studying at branches of foreign higher education institutions operating in Slovakia. You can be citizen of Slovakia, or any another country and you can study full time or part time in any study programme. You can be a student of any year, also you can be repeating a year of study. However, you must be an actual student registered at one of the higher education institutions operating in Slovakia.

You can join the survey until May the 30th, 2021. You will get another chance next year only, so do not hesitate!

The quality of higher education is important to the future of Slovakia. We are convinced that higher education institutions should offer young people attractive study opportunities for them to succeed in life. In order to assess the quality of higher education institutions we would like to take into account the opinions of students like you, related to your own experience with education and life at schools.

For the first time ever, your feedback becomes official material used to assess the quality of higher education institutions. Thus, you have a unique opportunity to contribute to improving the quality of your higher education institution. Survey results form a part of the background documents used for the accreditation of higher education institutions, so your answers will carry weight! Our goal, with your help, is to improve the quality of higher education in Slovakia. After considering your answers, we will also negotiate with competent authorities in order to improve the higher education environment – either by means of legislative amendments or financial assistance. For the first time ever, your answers can have a strong impact!

Because we will listen to your opinion. The fewer students express their opinion, the less accurate our findings will be. If we really want to improve the quality of education, we have to know precisely what should be improved and where – at which school or on which study programme. We appreciate both critical and positive views.

For the first time, we have prepared a unified survey for all higher education students in Slovakia. This provides us with a unique opportunity to compare information from various schools and uncover common weaknesses. Moreover, we plan to repeat the survey each year, so that we see emerging developments in higher education in Slovakia. However, surveys administered by schools themselves remain indispensable. The school survey is more detailed and focuses on specific situations you encounter at your school. Thus, you can assess both individual courses and teachers. Your school can get valuable information in this way and focus more on those areas that are not covered in our Quarter to Quality Education survey. We would appreciate your feedback through filling out both our survey and the prospective school survey.

In the survey, we ask questions related to the quality of instruction, knowledge and skills you acquired, and your satisfaction with the teaching methods. We are also interested in how you view the approach of teachers to students. Also, we want to find out whether you think you are acquiring practical skills, relevant knowledge and how you perceive conditions for studies and the higher education environment. We are exploring the relationship of students with academic ethics – whether you encounter cheating and plagiarised work and how higher education institutions respond to it. We also look at how students select their school and study programme and what their plans are upon completion of their studies. Do graduates intend to stay in Slovakia or go abroad? Why? Do they plan to return? Do they feel prepared for life and work? The survey also includes several specific topics, such as the impact of the pandemic on higher education, study conditions available to students with special needs, or questions addressed to international students – what attracted them to come to Slovakia, how they feel about it and whether they plan to stay. Open up the survey and you can explore it in more detail by filling it out.

Yes. Anonymity is essential to us. Our goal is to obtain honest feedback from you, so we very much appreciate your trust. Your contact details are separated from your answers, so nobody (neither us nor your higher education institution) will be able to link answers to a specific person later. We thus protect you so that nobody is able to act against your interests as a result of your views.

We usually send a unique link to fill out the survey to your school email address. Check whether your email did not get lost somewhere, write the term “Akademická štvrťhodinka” (Quarter to Quality Education) in the search box or check your Spam/Trash folder.

Don’t worry if you did not receive an email from us. You can ask the Accreditation agency what happened through their e-mail prieskum@saavs.sk. You can also ask for the link through filling in the form that you will find on our website: prieskum.saavs.sk in the section: “How to fill in the survey”

Regarding technical issues, you can contact Go4insight, s.r.o., the IT provider of our survey. You can ask for technical assistance from them.

For the purposes of official communication, your email address is stored in the Central Registry of Students, maintained by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Slovak Republic. We are a public body established by law and as such, we can access this registry for the purposes of supervising the quality of higher education institutions. For us, one of the main pillars of quality is student opinion and satisfaction, so we contact you using the email address you have in the registry. The use of your email address is strictly governed by GDPR rules, laid down in the agreement signed by the Slovak Accreditation Agency for Higher Education and the Ministry of Education. Your email address will not be used for any purposes other than those you provide consent to. You can find more information about data protection here.

We only collect your responses in the questionnaire – these are essential to us. However, for your convenience in filling out the survey, some information about you, which is stored in the Registry of Students, is pre-filled automatically. This is mainly demographic data, such as age, gender, citizenship, higher education institution, faculty, field of study, and study programme (language of instruction, form of study, level of study, and status of study). The privacy of your data is of utmost importance to us, so we protect it in accordance with the strict GDPR rules. We only collect your responses in the questionnaire – these are essential to us. However, for your convenience in filling out the survey, some information about you, which is stored in the Registry of Students, is pre-filled automatically. This is mainly demographic data, such as age, gender, citizenship, higher education institution, faculty, field of study, and study programme (language of instruction, form of study, level of study, and status of study). The privacy of your data is of utmost importance to us, so we protect it in accordance with the strict GDPR rules.

Don’t worry, the survey is truly anonymous. At the end of the survey, we only ask whether you wish to participate in the prize draw. If you answer yes, you enter your email and in the case that you win, we will use this email to inform you. However, the prize draw is not linked with survey responses. We have prepared attractive prizes for you, but you are not obliged to participate in the prize draw.

If you want to know more about us or the content of the survey – why we prepared the survey – send us an email to prieskum@saavs.sk. More information about the process of creating the survey can be found here.

Yes. If you cannot spend the whole Quarter (of an hour) on our survey, you can return to it at any time. Until you submit the survey our system remembers your unique link, and any time you click on said link you can continue with the last question you answered. Also, your browser can remember you started filling out the survey and will resume it (if that is not the case, please try the option above).

We would appreciate you following our activities (on our website, and on the Facebook and Instagram pages of the Quarter to Quality Education survey). We are going to post information about results and interesting findings to the public in a transparent way.
At the end of the survey we ask you to indicate your interest in receiving information about survey results from us. If you answer yes, enter your email and we will inform you about the survey results. However, you can rest assured that the provision of information about the survey results is not linked with survey responses.

We will post the survey results in a transparent manner through an interactive application. You will be able to select graphs to match your preferences, see aggregate results of specific questions, see data for your school or field of study, or compare various higher education institutions. Also, we will present the survey results at a conference. Due to the pandemic, we will only be organising online events on the survey results this year.

As our survey is unique, being the first of its kind and scope among students in higher education in Slovakia, it is very important to us that it is professional and seamless in terms of technology. That is why we decided to collaborate with the reputable survey agency Go4Insight, s.r.o., which has provided technical solutions, platforms, distribution of invitations, and technical assistance over the course of developing and implementing the survey, along with processing the survey data.

If you study at multiple study programmes at various higher education institutions, then you have multiple school emails. Hence, you can fill in the survey for each of your studies separately. If you study on multiple study programmes at the same higher education institution, you can choose one study programme and fill in the survey respective to that.

Yes. In the survey, we even have special sections devoted to these students and their specificities.

We would be glad if you share posts from our social network pages (Facebook, Instagram) or the web page, including all necessary information, with your friends or classmates. Remember, the email sent to your school email address contains a link unique to you to fill out the survey. Your classmates should find their own unique links in emails sent to their own mailboxes.

Nothing. Participation in the survey is voluntary. If you do not want to fill out the survey, just ignore it. If you do not wish to be contacted about the survey further just mark it in the email you received, and we will not bother you with the survey anymore. However, if you change your mind later, you can use the link you received and fill in the survey. Or you can visit our web page.

According to the encyclopaedia of the Slovak Academy of Science, the “academic quarter of an hour” is „a habit of starting a lecture at a higher education institution or different academic events within a quarter of an hour after the defined time (cum tempore); the opposite: without an academic quarter of an hour means exactly on time (sine tempore)“ Term “Akademická štvrťhodinka” [online]. Encyclopaedia Beliana, ISBN 978-80-89524-30-3.).

This term is also mentioned on Wikipedia. The Czech article about this issue explains that this habit has its roots in a courteous approach towards people telling the time of day by the sun – these were often academic staff, so the term “academic quarter of an hour” became established. The length of this time period is based on the time difference between the moment when the sun is in its highest position and the moment when a clock shows noon. This difference is caused by the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun. It achieves a maximum of 16 minutes (on 11 February and 3–4 November) (Term “Akademická čtvrthodinka” [online]. Hvězdárna v Rokycanech, 2008-02-07 [cit. 2010-10-26]).

An English article on Wikipedia draws from a different source and explains that in the past, the ringing of the church bells was the general method of time keeping. Since universities had their buildings spread out over a larger area of the town, students had 15 minutes to get to the lecture after the bells had rung. (W. L. (1886-03-18), “Student Life in Heidelberg”, The Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, V (11), p. 166)

You can manage a lot of things in 15 minutes, for example being late due to a sundial. Or you can fill out our survey!