Here are some of the best questions for a high school freshman student survey about guidance counseling support, plus tips for designing them. With Specific, you can quickly build a conversational survey that brings out deep insights in seconds.
Best open-ended questions for high school freshmen about guidance counseling support
Open-ended questions encourage honest feedback, nuanced responses, and stories that can’t be captured with checkboxes. Use these when you need context, want students’ perspectives, or hope to discover needs you didn’t anticipate. They are especially vital when U.S. schools are struggling with a high student-to-counselor ratio (national average: 424:1, well above the recommended 250:1) and need to prioritize resources wisely. [1]
What concerns or questions have you had about starting high school, and who did you ask for support?
How easy or difficult was it to locate and talk with your guidance counselor since starting high school?
Can you describe a time when you needed help with a personal, academic, or social issue at school?
What do you wish your guidance counselor would help you with that hasn’t been addressed yet?
In what ways has your guidance counselor made you feel comfortable or uncomfortable?
How could the guidance counseling program be improved to better support you and your classmates?
What’s something you would change about the process of reaching out to your counselor?
Which topics or challenges would you like to discuss with a counselor in the coming months?
What advice would you give to new students about making the most of counseling resources?
Is there anything you think counselors might misunderstand about the needs of freshmen?
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for high school freshman students
Single-select multiple-choice questions help quantify key issues, benchmark opinions, and make it easy for respondents to get started. This is useful when you want to spot patterns, prioritize interventions, or gently start a conversation—sometimes students will answer a simple choice before opening up more in a follow-up. This type of question is also more accessible for quick check-ins or larger-scale outreach where high response rates matter.
Question: Since starting high school, how many times have you spoken directly with a guidance counselor?
0 times
1–2 times
3 or more times
Question: How comfortable do you feel approaching a guidance counselor with a personal issue?
Very comfortable
Somewhat comfortable
Not comfortable
Question: What is the main reason you might hesitate to seek support from a guidance counselor?
Don't know what they can help with
Worried about privacy
Not enough time or availability
Other
When to follow up with "why?" Use follow-up questions when a student selects or gives a short answer that lacks detail. For example, if a student says they're "not comfortable" approaching a counselor, ask, "Why do you feel this way?" This reveal deeper context and surfaces actionable insights. AI can make this process seamless by prompting at just the right moments—a big advantage versus static surveys.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? It's important to include "Other" whenever you suspect your fixed options might not cover every unique experience or barrier. When students pick "Other," prompt them to explain—sometimes their answers highlight issues you didn’t know existed.
NPS as a metric for guidance counseling support
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful, single-question metric that measures how likely students are to recommend guidance counseling to friends. It provides a high-level, standardized read on overall satisfaction—helpful when tracking change over time, or benchmarking between grades, schools, or districts. With high school mental health needs climbing (46% of U.S. teens experience some form of mental disorder [2]), NPS can signal whether students feel genuinely supported.
You can instantly create an NPS-style survey for high school freshmen using this pre-built tool.
The power of follow-up questions
Following up is the secret ingredient for clarity and richer insights. As described in our deep-dive on automated follow-up questions, automated AI follow-ups let you capture the “why” behind a student’s answer—just like an expert interviewer, but at scale. Specific uniquely uses real-time AI to ask these context-aware probes, seamlessly clarifying ambiguous answers or asking for examples.
High school freshman: "I don't really go to the counselor's office."
AI follow-up: "What stops you from visiting the counselor? Is it location, time, or something else?"
How many follow-ups to ask? Usually two to three follow-ups are enough for depth without overwhelming students. It’s best to let the AI move to the next question once the main information is gathered—Specific lets you fine-tune this setting for each survey.
This makes it a conversational survey: each student feels like they’re part of a real discussion, not just ticking boxes.
AI helps analyze open-ended answers: Even if you gather pages of text, you can use AI-powered analysis to quickly find patterns, summarize pain points, and ask directly about themes in your data. No need to manually read every answer.
Automated AI follow-up questions are a new frontier in surveys—try generating a survey yourself to see just how natural and insightful the experience can be.
How to prompt ChatGPT (or other GPTs) for strong survey questions
You can use AI tools like ChatGPT to brainstorm excellent questions, as long as you start with a clear, task-oriented prompt. Here’s how:
For initial ideas, prompt:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for High School Freshman Student survey about Guidance Counseling Support.
You get better results if you add extra context about your goals, audience background, or current challenges—here’s how that looks:
I’m designing a survey for freshmen at a large, diverse high school where counselor access is limited. Suggest 10 open-ended questions to uncover what students need most from guidance counseling, including mental health and academic support.
Once you have a batch of questions, try prompting:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then, pick the categories most relevant to your objectives, and ask AI to go deeper:
Generate 10 questions for categories Academic Support, Mental Health, and Accessibility of Counselors.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey is an interactive, chat-style feedback experience where students (or other respondents) feel like they’re chatting with an intelligent interviewer—not just completing a static form. With AI-driven surveys, the script adapts in real time: questions evolve depending on student responses, and follow-up probing happens instantly.
The difference from traditional surveys is huge. Traditionally, you’d write a long form, collect generic responses, and then spend hours cleaning, sorting, and analyzing them. With AI survey generators like Specific, you just describe your goals, let the AI generate the survey, and benefit from real-time conversations and automated insight analysis.
Manual Survey Creation | AI-Generated Conversational Survey |
|---|---|
Scripting each question & logic manually | Describe needs, AI writes questions & probes |
Flat, one-size-fits-all question flow | Dynamic, adapts to each student in real time |
Slow to analyze, hard to summarize | Instant AI-powered insights & summaries |
Lower data quality, less engagement | Higher response quality & depth [7] |
Why use AI for high school freshman student surveys? AI-driven conversational surveys don’t just save time—they discover real issues faster. For example, AI learning analytics can spot at-risk students earlier, reducing dropout rates by up to 15%. [5] AI-survey chatbots have also been proven to elicit more informative and relevant student feedback than traditional online forms. [7] So, when you use a tool like Specific, you improve not just the ease but also the value of your student surveys.
If you want a step-by-step guide, check out our article on how to create a high school freshman student survey about guidance counseling support.
Specific offers a best-in-class conversational survey experience—both for you designing the questions and for your respondents sharing their thoughts—making your feedback process smooth, engaging, and high quality from start to finish.
See this guidance counseling support survey example now
Ready to engage your students and unlock the insights that matter? Create your own AI-powered, conversational survey and connect with every high school freshman in a smarter, more meaningful way today.