Your Course Evaluation Is Already a Student-Wellbeing Instrument. You're Reading It as Satisfaction.

Bottom line: Workload, assessment bunching, clarity of expectations, feedback and belonging are not just satisfaction drivers — they are modifiable academic determinants of student mental health, and the sector's own frameworks now say so. The University Mental Health Charter names the curriculum and "learning, teaching and assessment" as a domain of wellbeing, not just of achievement. Which means the course-evaluation data you already collect is, in part, a population-level wellbeing instrument. Most institutions read it as a customer-satisfaction score and throw the signal away.

The scale of the problem — and where it comes from

Student mental health has deteriorated sharply. The share of UK undergraduates reporting a mental health condition or difficulty rose from around 6% in 2016/17 to roughly 16% by 2022/23 — about one in six — according to figures compiled by the House of Commons Library from the HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey. A 2023 King's College London Policy Institute analysis found student mental health problems had risen steeply over a comparable period. This is not only a clinical or a student-services matter. The University Mental Health Charter (Hughes & Spanner, 2019, Student Minds), which builds on Universities UK's Stepchange framework, is explicit that a genuine whole-university approach must consider the role of academics and the curriculum — its "Learn" domain covers transition, learning, teaching and assessment, and progression as wellbeing themes, not merely academic ones.

The policy machinery has followed. The £2m, OfS-funded Education for Mental Health toolkit — developed by Advance HE with Student Minds and university partners including Aston, Derby and King's College London — exists precisely to help academic staff design curricula that support wellbeing and learning together. The premise across all of it: how a course is designed and assessed is a determinant of student mental health, and therefore something an institution can change.

The instrument you already run

Here is the underused fact. The determinants the Charter and the toolkit point to — workload and its bunching, clarity of expectations, the fairness and timing of assessment, the quality and speed of feedback, whether a student feels they belong — are the very things course evaluation already asks about. Consider ECTS workload validity: an "unmanageable workload" rating is also a signal about a stressor with a direct line to wellbeing. Consider belonging, which the evidence ties to both retention and mental health. A course evaluation is, in effect, a termly population-level survey of modifiable academic stressors — you are simply reading it as a satisfaction league table instead of as wellbeing intelligence.

Reading it the second way changes what you look for. A satisfaction lens asks "what is our mean?" A wellbeing lens asks "where is the workload spike, which assessment week is a pile-up, which cohort's open text is full of overwhelm, and which of these can we design out?" The data barely changes; the question does.

Where Koji fits

Koji makes the wellbeing signal legible without turning evaluation into a clinical screen — a line it should not cross. Its AI-moderated conversational interviews can ask about the academic determinants directly — how manageable the workload felt, whether assessments clustered, whether expectations were clear — and probe when a student flags stress, capturing the why a scale item hides. Automatic thematic analysis surfaces wellbeing-relevant patterns across a cohort — recurring mentions of overwhelm, assessment bunching, unclear briefs — that no satisfaction mean would reveal, and does so at population scale rather than one disclosure at a time.

Because the six structured question types combine a comparable scale with open narrative, an institution can track a workload or clarity indicator term on term and read the stories behind a spike. Formative, mid-cycle collection is the crucial feature here: a wellbeing signal caught in week 6 can be acted on for the cohort that raised it, not just noted for next year's redesign. And because Koji themes and aggregates rather than exposing individual transcripts, it treats this as curriculum-level wellbeing intelligence, not surveillance of individuals — the appropriate altitude for a course evaluation. Institutions running dedicated wellbeing or service research beyond the curriculum use the same interview engine on koji.so.

But isn't this mission creep — a course survey is not a mental-health assessment?

This is the objection to take seriously, and the answer is a firm boundary. A course evaluation must not become a clinical instrument, a diagnostic screen, or a way to identify individual students at risk — that is the job of trained services, with proper consent and safeguards, and conflating the two would be both ethically wrong and clinically useless. The claim here is narrower and defensible: course design is a determinant of wellbeing, per the sector's own frameworks, so the modifiable academic factors your evaluation already measures are legitimately readable as population-level wellbeing intelligence. Koji surfaces and helps mitigate curriculum-level stressors; it does not, and must not, assess or diagnose anyone. There is also an honest evidential limit: that workload correlates with wellbeing does not prove your redesign will improve mental health, which is multiply determined. The right posture is to treat the evaluation as an early signal to investigate and design against — alongside, never instead of, proper wellbeing services and their own feedback channels. Read that way, an instrument you already run becomes one of the cheapest sources of actionable wellbeing insight you have.

Which items are already wellbeing items

You do not need a new survey to start; you need to re-tag the questions you already ask. Items on workload and its distribution across the term map to the single most consistent academic stressor. Items on clarity of expectations and assessment briefs map to the uncertainty that drives anxiety. Items on feedback quality and timeliness map to whether students feel supported to improve. Items on belonging and connection map to the isolation that predicts both attrition and distress. Read together, at cohort level, these are a modifiable-stressor profile of a course. The redesign levers they point to — spreading assessment deadlines, clarifying briefs, speeding feedback, building in connection — are ordinary good pedagogy that happens to also be wellbeing-protective, which is precisely why the curriculum counts as a determinant in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Is it appropriate to treat course evaluation as wellbeing data?

Only at the population and curriculum level, and only for the modifiable academic determinants of wellbeing — workload, assessment design, clarity, feedback, belonging. It must never be used to screen, diagnose or identify individual students at risk; that is the role of trained services with proper consent. The legitimate use is designing stressors out of the curriculum.

Which frameworks say the curriculum affects mental health?

The University Mental Health Charter (Hughes & Spanner, 2019, Student Minds) includes a "Learn" domain covering learning, teaching and assessment as wellbeing themes, and the OfS-funded Education for Mental Health toolkit (Advance HE, with Student Minds and university partners) helps academics design curricula that support wellbeing. Both treat course design as a determinant.

How bad is student mental health, actually?

Reported mental health difficulties among UK undergraduates rose from roughly 6% (2016/17) to about 16% (2022/23), around one in six, per House of Commons Library figures drawn from the HEPI/Advance HE survey. A 2023 King's College London analysis found a steep rise over a comparable period.

Won't asking about stress in an evaluation upset students or invite disclosure?

Asking about workload and assessment manageability is normal course-quality territory and is not a mental-health interview. If a student discloses distress, the institution needs clear signposting to services — a wellbeing instrument at curriculum level should route individuals to support, not attempt to handle disclosures itself.

Does acting on these signals actually improve mental health?

It should reduce modifiable academic stressors, which the evidence links to wellbeing — but mental health is multiply determined, so course redesign is one lever among many. Treat evaluation as an early signal to investigate, not proof that a change will fix outcomes.

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Want to read the wellbeing signal your course evaluation already contains? Explore Koji for Education and turn workload and assessment feedback into curriculum-level intelligence.