You will be asked to rate your overall satisfaction with the experience of your research degree programme, and your satisfaction with the following themes:
- supervision
- resources
- research culture
- community
- progress and assessment
- responsibilities
- support
- research skills and professional development
- opportunities
All actively registered (PGRs who held an active registration on 23 March 2023) Postgraduate Researchers who enrolled before 1 January 2023 will be invited to take part. This includes PhD, MPhil and Professional Doctorate students.
If you are eligible, you will receive an email link to the survey on Thursday 30 March. This will be sent to your LJMU email account and will come from JISC Online Surveys.
You can also log in to the survey through this link.
If you have any problems accessing or completing the survey, please contact Victoria Sheppard in the Doctoral Academy: v.m.sheppard@ljmu.ac.uk.
Your survey response is confidential to the team processing the results and no reporting outside of this team will identify any individual. Any results communicated to academic staff will be anonymised.
The survey asks that any comments you make should not identify yourself or any specific members of staff.
You can find out more information about how your personal data is used and protected in the Postgraduate Research Evaluation Survey privacy notice.
Your feedback is important. Over one hundred universities and colleges take part in PRES, both in the UK and globally. This means we can compare your experience against similar postgraduates at other institutions to see if we are supporting your learning as we should. We use the findings to improve the experience for you and for future postgraduate researchers.
Anonymous survey responses are aggregated to produce an overall national report, published on the Advance HE website. The responses from PGRs at each participating university are also aggregated into a confidential report for that institution. A summary of the key LJMU results, and how they compare to the sector, will be shared with all LJMU PGRs later in the year.
A full report on the PRES results will be reviewed by the Doctoral Academy, your PGR Representatives, Faculty Research Degrees Committees, the University’s Postgraduate Research Committee, and other relevant groups and committees. The results inform both University and Faculty-level action plans.
LJMU runs the PRES every two years. A summary of the 2021 PRES results can be found online. 2021 results showed high levels of satisfaction with overall experience, support, resources and supervision, while research culture and research skills were identified as areas for improvement. Since 2021, University and Faculty action plans have focused on enhancing these areas. PGRs now benefit from more opportunities to share ideas and engage with other researchers; a clearer articulation of research seminars in schools and faculties; and an enhanced PGR training offer addressing the skills that respondents felt least confident about, such as project management, creativity, and publishing.
If you are unsure about anything to do with the survey please contact Victoria Sheppard in the Doctoral Academy by email: v.m.sheppard@ljmu.ac.uk.