Best questions for student survey about assessment fairness

Here are some of the best questions for a student survey about assessment fairness, plus some practical tips for drafting them. If you’re short on time or seeking inspiration for your own survey, we can help you generate a tailored student assessment fairness survey in seconds through Specific.

Best open-ended questions for student survey about assessment fairness

Open-ended questions let students voice their honest opinions, often surfacing insights you hadn’t even considered. They’re especially valuable if you want real feedback rather than just checking boxes. In fact, a study at a Spanish public university found that using open-ended questions in student evaluations resulted in a 35% response rate—dramatically higher than typical closed-response questionnaires, which got about 15%.[1] That speaks volumes about how engaging and valuable open-ended prompts can be.

The best time to use open-ended questions is when you’re hunting for context, stories, or new perspectives about assessment fairness—especially if you’re looking for root causes, not just quick opinions.

1. What is your overall perception of fairness in the way you are assessed in this class?

2. Can you describe a situation where you felt the assessment process was unfair? What happened?

3. What factors do you believe most contribute to fair or unfair assessments at our school?

4. How clearly do you feel the grading criteria are communicated to you?

5. If you could change one thing about how assessments are given or graded, what would it be?

6. Tell us about a time when feedback from an assessment helped (or didn’t help) you improve.

7. How comfortable do you feel discussing assessment results with your instructors? Why?

8. What, if anything, makes you doubt the fairness of assessments here?

9. How do group assessments compare to individual ones in terms of fairness, in your experience?

10. What suggestions do you have to make assessment processes more fair for everyone?

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for student survey about assessment fairness

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect when you need to quantify student sentiments, benchmark changes over time, or simply kick off a meaningful conversation. They’re easier for students to answer quickly—sometimes making it less intimidating to start providing input. Later, you can explore deeper “why” questions to pinpoint root causes.

Here are three practical multiple-choice survey questions you’ll want to include:

Question: How fair do you believe the assessment process is overall?

• Very fair

• Somewhat fair

• Not so fair

• Not at all fair

Question: How often do you feel you know exactly how your work will be graded before submitting it?

• Always

• Often

• Sometimes

• Rarely

• Never

Question: What do you feel is the biggest influence on assessment fairness in your classes?

• Clear grading rubrics

• Instructor consistency

• Assessment format

• Peer involvement

• Other

When to followup with "why?" You want to ask “why” as a follow-up whenever a student’s choice exposes a gap, or you want clarity about their reasoning. For example, if someone says an assessment isn’t fair, always nudge for details: **"Thanks for sharing—can you explain why you feel that way?"** This leads to context and actionable ideas for improvement.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including "Other" gives students a way to mention issues or factors you didn't anticipate—often leading to unexpected, eye-opening insights in their follow-ups. This is a goldmine if you want to catch what you didn't know to ask for!

Should you use an NPS-like question for student survey about assessment fairness?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) approach isn’t just for businesses measuring customer loyalty. NPS is also superb for education—helping you benchmark sentiment at-a-glance and spotting trends over time. In the context of assessment fairness, you can apply an NPS-style question like:

“On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend this course’s assessment process as fair to a peer?”

This single question packs a punch—it gives you a quantifiable metric to track, yet the followup (“Why did you give that score?”) uncovers motivations and ideas for improvement. We’ve seen this approach pay off across numerous institutions and pilot projects. You can easily generate an NPS fairness survey for students and start collecting both numbers and stories.

The power of follow-up questions

The beauty of automated follow-up questions really shows when gathering nuanced, contextual feedback. As research comparing traditional online versus AI-powered conversational surveys found, AI-driven interviews sparked more informative, relevant, and specific replies, outclassing old-school web forms.[3] If you want to see exactly how Specific’s automatic AI follow-up questions feature works in action, it’s worth exploring.

With Specific, AI follows up intelligently based on a student's previous reply—instantly probing for details, clarifications, or examples as a skilled interviewer would. This makes feedback richer for analysis and much easier to act on. Plus, you avoid wasting time with email back-and-forths just to clarify survey answers.

• Student: “I don’t think the feedback I got was fair.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you tell me more about why the feedback felt unfair or what you wish was done differently?”

How many followups to ask? Generally, 2–3 follow-ups are sufficient to explore any one answer. Specific lets you adjust this—ensuring you don’t overwhelm the student, while always collecting what you need. You can even set rules to move on once you have the insight you’re after.

This makes it a conversational survey: you’re not blasting forms—you’re having a real conversation. That’s why respondents find it much more engaging.

AI survey response analysis is now seamless—AI can review all those rich, unstructured replies and distill themes fast (see our walkthrough on using AI to analyze student survey responses if you want to see how it works).

This automated, context-driven approach to follow-ups is fresh—why not generate an assessment fairness survey yourself and see how conversational surveys feel in practice?

How to use prompts to create questions for a student survey about assessment fairness

If you’d like to draft your own questions with ChatGPT (or another AI), just frame your prompt like this:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a student survey about assessment fairness.

But the results get even better if you provide context: describe your school, the types of assessments you’re curious about, or challenges you’re experiencing. For example:

We are a high school in the US piloting new digital assessments. Students have voiced concerns about grading transparency. Please suggest 10 open-ended survey questions to gain deeper insights into students’ perceptions of assessment fairness.

Want to organize your survey? Run:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Once you see your categories, you can dig deeper where needed:

Generate 10 questions for these categories: grading transparency, instructor consistency, and student anxiety.

Pairing these prompts with Specific’s AI-powered survey editor gives you incredible flexibility to update your surveys on the fly—simply tell the AI what you want changed.

What is a conversational survey (and how AI-generated surveys are different)

Conversational surveys are transforming how we collect student feedback by replacing stale, impersonal forms with dynamic, chat-based interviews. Unlike traditional surveys, the questions adapt in real time—AI picks up on student replies, asks relevant follow-ups, and creates a genuine dialogue. The result? Sharper insights and higher response rates, as research demonstrates.[3]

Why use AI for student surveys? We get faster, deeper, and more relevant insights with less administrative headache. Using an AI survey generator means you can build, launch, and analyze a conversational survey—all in one place, without becoming a survey expert. The end result: the feedback you collect is not only richer, but easier to act on, thanks to built-in AI survey response analysis.

Interested in how to create your own? Have a look at our guide to creating a student survey about assessment fairness.

Specific is built to offer the best-in-class conversational survey experience, making both survey creators and students feel heard, engaged, and respected—while the analysis is a breeze.

See this assessment fairness survey example now

Jump into an interactive survey experience that gives you deeper insights, smarter follow-ups, and faster analysis—all in one seamless workflow. See what makes conversational, AI-powered surveys the new standard in student assessment feedback.