Surveys vs. Assessments: What’s the Difference?
You could be forgiven for thinking that surveys and assessments are the same. They both use the art of asking questions and gathering answers to achieve their objectives. But those objectives are very different.
Surveys are about gathering data for the person (or people) asking the question. They're often incentivized through discounts, prizes, or even a sense of responsibility, like completing the census for your country.
Assessments, on the other hand, balance gathering data with delivering feedback. While assessments also gather data, the data is qualified, quantified, and returned to the respondent. As a result, the feedback is the incentive to complete questions because the respondent receives something valuable in return.
Delivering value
The most definitive difference between surveys and assessments is what happens after the data is captured and how the value is delivered.
Upon completing a survey, respondents rarely receive detailed feedback, if any feedback at all. In a customer satisfaction survey, for example, your answers may help a company improve. But, you usually don’t see how your input fits into the bigger picture—let’s be honest, most of us are just in it for the Amazon voucher. Sometimes, you might be redirected based on an overall score, but this will often be a high-level landing page or a next-step call to action.
Assessments focus on providing personalized and contextualized feedback upon completion. This feedback helps respondents make sense of their results, often including comparisons to peers, detailed ratings, graphs and charts, or a breakdown of individual performance. Assessments should reflect data back to the respondent and connect it to expert-selected guidance and resources based on their input. This might include links to articles, videos, or next steps that offer more insight and practical value.
Brilliant Assessments delivers feedback in three formats: a results page, a PDF report, and a Word document. All three can be made available to respondents immediately upon completion. For groups or teams, assessments can also be created for cohorts, giving assessors and managers a top-down view of overall trends, performance gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
👉 Pro Tip for Assessments: Make Feedback Proactive
In assessments, feedback shouldn’t just highlight strengths and weaknesses—it should also offer guidance for improvement. For example, if someone struggles with time management, you can suggest a course or practical strategies to help. Where surveys often stop at just collecting data, Assessments can pick up the baton and help individuals make changes for the better.
Measuring success
In surveys, scoring is usually defined in a linear fashion for each question, section, or assessment overall. This helps highlight general trends and examine the overall outcomes. Increasingly, you can also weigh survey questions and answers, which usually roll into the average score.
In assessments, scoring creates a true north for feedback and often relies on more complex calculations or combinations to achieve the level of personalization needed.
Choosing an approach
If you’re unsure whether you want to build an assessment or a survey, sometimes an example can put things in perspective. Let’s say your goal as an event director was to help keynote speakers improve their performance.
Using a survey
A conference feedback survey might have attendees rate different areas of a keynote talk from 1 to 5. Attendees are incentivized because all participants go in the draw to win an iPad. You gather your responses, give away an iPad, and learn that the audience gives the speaker an average score of 4.2. This is useful for spotting popular topics but doesn’t offer much detail on individual experiences or areas for improvement.
Using an assessment
On the other hand, an assessment could ask the speakers (as respondents) about the audience's sentiment, reactions in different parts of their talk, the theme of questions in the Q & A, and what they felt went well. The assessment platform can then generate a feedback report on areas of improvement, complete with a list of recommended courses for the speaker. The event manager can also understand how all their speakers felt about their performance as a cohort.
Two sides of the same coin?
So, should you use a survey or an assessment? It depends. Consider your budget, resources, and, most importantly, the type of data you need and what you want to do with it. There you’ll find your answer.
While surveys and assessments both involve collecting data through questions, they serve different purposes and offer distinct outcomes. If you'd like to explore how Brilliant Assessments could take your surveys and turn them into tools for delivering powerful feedback – or if you have an assessment in mind you’d like to create, watch a demo now or book some time with our team to talk about whether Brilliant is a fit for you.
