Describe your department and reporting priorities. Makeform creates a focused survey covering academic experience, advising, belonging, career preparation, post-graduation plans, and follow-up permission.
Send graduate responses to Google Sheets, Slack, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, revise it, and send the prompt to the Makeform builder.
Audience
Seniors completing a bachelor's degree
Format
Five-minute survey with ratings and branching
Prompt size
335 chars
Example survey structure
Five-minute survey with ratings and branching
Program and graduation term
Rate teaching, advising, and belonging
What was most valuable?
What is your primary next step?
May we contact you for follow-up?
Suggested routing tags
Employment
Further study
Seeking opportunities
Ask about both the primary next step and whether it is confirmed; an aspiration and an accepted job or admission offer are different reporting signals.
Step 1
Define
program goals and reporting groups
Step 2
Build
ratings, open text, and plan branches
Step 3
Invite
graduates respond before departure
Step 4
Review
themes and next-step segments
Useful exit evidence
Separate the learning experience from each graduate's next step so departments can act on the results.
Use one scale for teaching, advising, belonging, facilities, and career preparation to compare groups and terms.
Employment, further study, service, and job-search paths reveal only relevant follow-ups.
Focused open questions capture valuable experiences, barriers, and priorities that ratings cannot explain.
Designed for departments
Keep a shared core for comparison, then add the program-specific questions each faculty or student-services team needs.
Measure curriculum coherence, course access, teaching, mentoring, and resources while the full student experience is still recent.
Separate confirmed employment or enrollment from intentions, and gather role, employer, institution, or support needs through conditional paths.
Ask about advising, community, inclusion, and barriers with optional identity fields and a clearly explained purpose for each demographic question.
Collect a lasting email and explicit contact preference separately from anonymous program feedback, then plan an appropriate follow-up.
Survey workflow
Start with the department's decisions, then give every question a clear reporting role.
Name the programs, completion term, desired reporting groups, and the few decisions this cycle's feedback should inform.
Choose consistent scales, keep open responses focused, and remove questions already answered reliably in institutional records.
Route each graduate to employment, education, service, or seeking-support questions without asking everyone to skip irrelevant fields.
Share the survey before students lose campus access, monitor response patterns, and contact only graduates who agreed to future outreach.
Choose the right method
Ratings, open responses, and administrative records answer different questions. Use each where it provides the clearest evidence.
Field guide
Use six compact sections that move from program context to experience, outcomes, and optional follow-up without making every graduate answer every possible question.
Program context
Collect only academic details needed for analysis. Program, degree, concentration, and term create useful segments; small cohorts may need fewer.
Academic experience
Apply one labeled scale to curriculum, course access, instruction, challenge, and learning experiences. Add a not-applicable option where needed.
Support and belonging
Ask about experiences with advising, mentoring, accessibility, inclusion, and community without inviting assumptions about individual staff.
Next-step plans
Identify the primary path and whether it is confirmed. Then capture an employer, institution, or needed support conditionally.
Reflection
Ask what contributed most, what barrier mattered, and which single change deserves attention.
Contact and follow-up
Explain why a personal email is requested and keep identifying fields optional when feedback is anonymous.
Related tools
Build adjacent student, course, and alumni forms with live Makeform tools.
Collect graduate student experiences, resources, and academic progress in a broader questionnaire.
Open toolGather course-level feedback that complements the graduate's program-wide reflection.
Open toolCreate a flexible survey for current students before their final term.
Open toolLearn how graduates want to participate after leaving the university.
Open toolUpdate personal email, location, and communication preferences for future outreach.
Open toolStart from a general exit survey structure for another departing group.
Open toolFAQ
Practical guidance for departments planning a useful final survey.
A graduate exit survey captures a student's program experience, preparation, immediate plans, and optional contact details near degree completion. Departments can use themes for improvement and later follow-up.
Include program and completion context, consistent ratings for curriculum and support, questions about belonging and preparation, a primary post-graduation plan with conditional details, two or three focused reflection prompts, and optional permission for future contact.
Send it while students still have university email access and remember the program clearly, such as after a final advising appointment, degree checkout, or capstone completion.
Anonymous feedback can encourage candor, while identified responses support follow-up. State the approach clearly. If feedback is anonymous, keep contact details optional and explain how they are handled.
Ask for one primary next step, whether it is confirmed, and only then show relevant fields. Employed graduates can see employer and role questions; continuing students can see institution and credential questions; those still searching can choose support they want.
Keep the shared core short enough for one sitting. Prioritize questions tied to decisions, branch away irrelevant fields, and use open text for specific causes or improvements.
Yes. Makeform provides unlimited free forms and responses, so a department can generate, edit, publish, and collect its survey without a response cap. A paid tier is available to remove the Makeform badge.
Responses can be reviewed in Makeform and connected to tools such as Google Sheets, Slack, and Zapier. Use program or next-step answers as routing fields, and limit access to staff whose work requires the information collected.
Make the final student check-in count.
