FLEX is the acronym for the “Feedback on the Learning Experience Survey" It was developed on this campus as one way to collect information from students about your courses and teaching. Background information about the system is hosted on the Provost website.

FLEX is used in approximately 14,000 course sections each year.

Users can access FLEX at go.illinois.edu/flex

The Flex system will send your students an email on the first day the evaluation form becomes available to them. They will also receive up to four reminder emails before the system closes the feedback form. Reminder emails are only sent to students who have not yet completed a form. We encourage you to remind your students to complete the FLEX feedback form. It would be beneficial to explain why the feedback is valued and how the course has changed based on past feedback.

We automatically load all eligible courses into FLEX. By default, this excludes Independent Study (IND) sections, Research (RES) sections, internship and study abroad sections without a classroom component, and sections consisting only of a series of speakers. Please contact us at flex@illinois.edu if your section has not been loaded when it should have been.

Only individuals regularly interacting with all of the students registered in a section in a teaching capacity are eligible to administer FLEX. Those who are only grading, staffing office hours, or providing other forms of administrative support are not eligible.

The FLEX system will load any instructor who has greater than 0% responsibility for a course (as listed in Banner). Your departmental scheduler is responsible for ensuring this information is accurate in Banner. 

Yes instructors can administer FLEX during class time. FLEX is mobile-friendly and students can access it on their smartphones or laptops. We recommend giving students about 10 minutes at the beginning of class—not the end—to complete their FLEX questionnaire.

Two practices that can significantly increase the response rate are the following:

Make the completion of FLEX questionnaires a task to be completed on your course website but bear in mind that it can’t be required. Users, including students, can access the system at go.illinois.edu/flex.

Instructors can allocate time (10-15 minutes should be adequate) at the beginning, not the end, of one of their classes for students to complete the forms. The instructor should leave the room while students are completing the forms and resume class later.

For full-length 16-week courses, the final evaluation form is available for fourteen days with the evaluation period set to end on Reading Day by default. However, in order to avoid conflict with the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the evaluation period for 16-week fall sections lasts twelve days and begins on the Saturday after Thanksgiving Day.

For 8-week courses, the evaluation period is ten days long by default, and it generally begins four days before the last day of the term.

Please note that departments and instructors may choose to adjust the evaluation start and end dates.

At least three students need to be enrolled in a section for it to administer FLEX. This is to help preserve the confidentiality of student responses. 

Within FLEX, each instructor has a separate questionnaire. A single form cannot be shared among multiple instructors, and there is no combined evaluation form for team-taught courses

Yes. If your course ends before the official end of the semester, you can still administer FLEX. Please contact us at flex@illinois.edu as early as possible to let us know your end date so we can set up FLEX accordingly.

We encourage you to reach out to us if your class is taught this way. Administering FLEX soon after an instructor finishes teaching allows students to provide higher-quality feedback. It also reduces the number of FLEX questionnaires students need to complete at the end of the semester.

No. FLEX can only be used as the official end-of-course feedback. We value and encourage mid-semester feedback, but do not want to confuse students by offering FLEX for both informal and formal feedback.

Yes, FLEX responses are confidential. Instructors cannot associate student ratings with any particular student unless the student openly identifies themselves within the open-ended comment section.

Unfortunately, no. Once the feedback period has closed, it is not possible to reopen a FLEX form. However, if students still wish to share feedback, they are welcome to email the instructor or department head directly. Please note that this feedback will not be part of the official FLEX system.

FLEX results can be used in a number of ways within two broad areas: improving teaching and making decisions. After looking over student responses to the questions and discussing them with colleagues who teach well, instructors will be well-positioned to make meaningful improvements. Also, department heads may use FLEX as one way to identify instructors who might benefit from help with their teaching (for more on this, contact CITL at citl-info@illinois.edu).

FLEX results are available online two to three weeks after final exams. Instructors can log in to the FLEX system to view their full results. Department administrators also have access to these results. 

You may request an ICES longitudinal profile at go.illinois.edu/ices-lp-info.

Longitudinal profiles provide a historical summary of an instructor’s scores on global items 1 and 2, which were included in all ICES forms. Please note that starting in Fall 2025, some departments chose not to include these global questions in their FLEX course forms. 

Among other uses, longitudinal profiles may support promotion and tenure reviews as well as teaching awards. Instructors (faculty and TAs) can request a longitudinal profile at any time by using our web-based longitudinal profile request form.