This year, Committee on Student Activity with professional PSAC staffs used SurveyMonkey in a new voting process of choosing a Deerfield Day T-Shirt design. The voting had taken place online for a week, and exactly 537 out of the entire student body gave different ranks to twelve designs. Each voter could give twelve points to his most favorite one and one point to his least favorite one. Chris Krokus 08’s design “It’s just that easy” gained the most number of votes, with a total score of 5815. The “Deerfield Gum” and “Because not everyone gets into Choate” designs took second and third places with total scores of 5601 and 4841.
Meeting the Artist
Chris Krokus’ 08 drew an easy button on the back of the design because he owns an easy button on his desk. “My prefectees come and press it relentlessly,” Krokus said. The text on the back came from a poster Krokus saw that said: “Life’s Problems: One Solution / Jesus (easy button) / It’s just that easy.” The front of the T-shirt has another text message: “Trouble Getting into a New England Prep School?” According to Krokus, the T-shirt is designed to mock Deerfield Academy without using any expletives or derogatory words. “It basically says that Choate is a superior school to Deerfield in the admission process,” Krokus added.
Surveying the Students
The idea of using SurveyMonkey on the process came from Jim Yanelli, Director of Student Activities, and Mike Lavigne ’03 designed the program that would work for the procedure. The process is rather simple. An individual student pulls up his ballot online. The ballot has twelve designs. He can give each design a rating between one, the worst, and twelve, the best. And, he has to rank all the designs from the best to the least favorite. After the voting process is over, the computer accumulates all the results and calculates the final points of each design by a previously inputted formula.
“The new voting system is much more democratic,” Mr. Lavigne said. According to Christian B. Bielizna, Director of Student Activities, there were many paper submissions from students last year. Members of Student Council and COSA and PSAC staffs laid them out on the table, and they decided which was going to be the winning design. When the design was questionable or had controversial content, Mr. Ford, Dean of Students, also participated in the process.
SurveyMonkey offers a lot of logistical reasons. First, students are not allowed to vote twice.
Perks to the Process
The survey program has a function to allow each person only one vote. Furthermore, it tracks to make sure that there are no duplicated votes. “Designing our own system would have been much difficult,” Mr. Lavigne added. Second, SurveyMonkey is programmed to send reminders only to students who had not yet submitted their votes. It does not fill everybody’s mailbox with email saying “Don’t forget to vote,” as Mr. Lavigne described. Third, the program tabulates results automatically. After the voting was over, the staff could get all the accumulated results, such as the average points for top three candidates. The winner’s design got an average score of 10.15 out of 12. No paper ballots were needed and the staff and the COSA members did not need to sit down and count 573 ballots. Most importantly, students can vote anytime they want with SurveyMonkey. “Maybe we should vote all by SurveyMonkey,” Mr. Lavigne said.
In addition, SurveyMonkey has been widely used in our campus. Most recently, the fifth form held a class survey on the form dance using SurveyMonkey. Our Communication Office used it to survey what functions students use frequently on CHIP.
Getting More Students Involved
“I think a lot more people were able to participate in the voting process,” Mr. Yanelli said, “People who wanted were able to vote. This was possible due to available technology. We heard more voices; presumably, we will have the T-shirt that is appealing to the largest number of people.” Moreover, according to him, all twelve people were able to produce the designs that were technically sophisticated enough to be rendered online and distributed electronically. “I was impressed,” Mr. Yanelli added.
Taking Orders
COSA will take orders immediately according to Mr. Bielizna. COSA Members will take orders in the dining hall and the Student Kiosk. Because the new Choate cards do not work with old debit card machines, students will have to buy in cash or checks if they are ordering in the dining hall.
