TSSU Strike Impact on CES

September 2023 - January 2024

The Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) carried out various strike actions such as overtime bans and teach-ins beginning in June 2023. This resulted in a full work stoppage in late September to mid-October. SFU Community members have noted that the strike affected students’ course experiences and expressed concerns about how this may be reflected in Course Experience survey (CES) responses. 

When interpreting the Fall 2023 feedback response reports, responses should be taken in context of the possible disruptions brought about by the strike. 

LEAP has put together ad-hoc reports for each department to interpret the impact of this strike on the Fall 2023 CES responses. Each report included departmental data with university-wide data to allow departmental chairs to contextualize the effects of the strike on their courses in comparison to the broader university landscape.

The report outlines the data for the following factors:

• Comparison of the Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 data to indicate impact of strike on:
  • Response rate
  • Survey mean scores for each common core question
• Number of surveys containing strike-related comments to the Common Core questions
• Number of strike-related comments for each open-ended Common Core question

Departmental chairs also received a separate confidential report compiling strike-related comments corresponding to each core question.

At the university-level, the results indicate that there were:

• No significant changes in the response rate and the survey mean scores for each core question in Fall 2023 compared to Fall 2022.
• 1,136 out of 21,537 surveys (5.27%) included strike-related comments
• Most of the strike-related comments (39%) were responding to the core question “How would you improve this course for future students?”

Please refer to the university-wide report for more information on our inquiry on the TSSU strike impact on Fall 2023 CES: