VOICE report delayed due to clerical error

Due to a clerical error, the long awaited VOICE report will not be made public this week as originally planned.

The VOICE report is a series of recommendations for administrative action based on the results of a campus-wide survey last March. The report would have been presented in front of the Dean of Students, provost and the IU president this Friday, roughly 10 months after the survey was taken.

The survey was conducted by Campus Labs, an independent consulting firm.
IU Student Association Chief of Staff Augustin Ruta and Senior Adviser to the President Jarad Winget were in charge of writing the report.

Ruta said after putting the finishing touches on the report last week, they noticed a discrepancy in the demographic data Campus Labs sent them. Survey links had only been emailed to sophomores and juniors,  Assistant Vice Provost Judith Iumet said in an email.

This meant that the conclusions in the current report did not accurately reflect the opinions of the student body as a whole.

“Seeing that 50 percent of our sample was not in our survey release, we felt we couldn’t release the results because they won’t be legitimate,” Winget said.
Representatives of the company were unavailable for comment, but Ouimet was their primary contact on campus and was able to comment.

“Campus Labs has acknowledged the error and is doing everything in its power to help IUSA obtain data from all students currently enrolled,” Ouimet said. “It is my understanding that Campus Labs is readministering the VOICE survey at no charge to rectify the situation.”

IUSA funds were not used to hire Campus Labs, because the company was under contract with IU when the first survey was sent out by the Big Six administration in March 2012. The last administration spent $2700 on incentives, including an iPad, to encourage students to take the survey. Information on funding for incentives for the relaunched survey was not available at press time.

IU students received an email with a link to the relaunched survey on Monday. Ruta said the survey will be open for two weeks.

“Once that’s complete we’re going to go back in, polish the report, put new data in and see if any recommendations need to be changed,” he said.

Winget said they do not plan to rewrite the entire report, but instead will compare the data in the report to the data collected from the new survey and make changes as needed.

Ruta said it will take time to sift through the results of the updated survey, but the data will be more up-to-date than the results of the last survey.

“It’s going to delay us about a month and a half, maybe two,” Ruta said. “But at the end of the day, we’ll going to have a better report from it.”

There is no definite timeline for the report to be finished, but Ruta said that he and Winget will be working quickly to finish the report before the end of their
administration.

The publication of the report has been postponed until further notice. Ruta said  they will present their findings to administration and then to IU students via email.