Students convey inconvenience caused by lengthy, repetitive symptom survey

Students said the new Daily Symptom Monitoring Survey is helpful for COVID-19 safety but should be shortened for more convenience and to increase compliance.

UCLA created the Daily Symptom Monitoring Survey in June 2020 to improve campus safety by asking students, faculty and staff whether or not they are exhibiting any symptoms of COVID-19.

Bill Kisliuk, a UCLA spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the survey is an effective supplement for testing and checks for symptoms, vaccination status, close contacts and other factors that might influence someone’s probability of infection.

The university recently changed the survey to include more questions about vaccination status and students’ activity on campus to align with recommendations by local, state and federal public health officials, Kisliuk said.

However, UCLA students voiced concerns about the length of the survey.

The survey needs to be much shorter to make it more convenient for students, said Matthew Quisling, a second-year biology student. He added that it seemed like the survey creators did not consider how repetitive and extensive it is.

“The survey is effective, but it’s not efficient,” he said. “There’s too many questions that say the same thing.”

Joey Okumura, a second-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, also said the survey is too lengthy and tedious.

“If it were faster, and it was like, a couple of clicks, people would be more likely to take it,” she said.

Students could lie on the symptom monitoring survey just to get access to a building to go to class or to an event, Okumura added. People will only complete the survey when they absolutely need it in order to gain clearance somewhere on campus, she said.

[Related: Students express dissatisfaction, impatience with new symptom survey interface]

Jacquelyn Aramkul, a public health graduate student and representative on the Student Health Advisory Committee, said she thinks the survey streamlines contact tracing and helps prevent COVID-19 outbreaks.

If a student receives a positive result from a PCR test from a vending machine on campus – which must be completed weekly – the system keeps track of where people have been while infectious, Aramkul said.

Aramkul also said a shorter survey would be easier and less of a nuisance for students. She added that she thinks the survey doesn’t need to be a requirement for every building on campus but at least target the largest ones with the most student activity.

Quisling said some of the questions on the survey don’t have to be asked every day because the answers won’t change for a lot of people, such as being remote or hybrid or participating in music or theater activities. He said those answers should be saved to student profiles to reduce the number of questions.

Quisling also suggested that survey results should be linked to students’ BruinCards so they can easily scan it at a location, rather than show the survey itself.

Although UCLA sends students email reminders to fill out the survey, Okumura said she thinks text messages would be more efficient because students are more likely to check their texts. However, students may become annoyed by a daily automated text message, she added.

Temperature checks could be a better method for COVID-19 safety than the symptom monitoring survey if they didn’t take so much time, Okumura said. However, the long lines from this type of safety procedure might discourage students from attending in-person classes at all, she added.

“I think there’s some people who are very, very conservative and then others who aren’t and so (the UCLA administration is) trying to kind of do this thing where they please both of them and they end up not pleasing either,” Okumura said.

Contributing reports from Maddy Blasingame and Anna Feng, Daily Bruin staff.