Draft SED Pledge

DRAFT SED PLEDGE:

To appear on surveys completed by doctorate recipients from participating AAU schools

The National Science Foundation applies strong measures to safeguard respondent information. The information for the Survey of Earned Doctorates is solicited under the authority of the NSF Act of 1950, as amended. All information you provide is protected under the NSF Act and the Privacy Act of 1974, and will be used only for research or statistical purposes. Your response is voluntary, and failure to provide some or all of the requested information will not in any way adversely affect you. Release of an individual’s response is prohibited by law; information publicly released (such as statistical summaries) will be in a form that does not personally identify you or other respondents. The last four digits of your Social Security Number are solicited under the NSF Act of 1950, as amended; it will be used to assure that we identify the correct person especially in Federal program evaluation, and provision of this information is voluntary.

If you agree, NSF will send your SED responses to [institution name], who will merge this information with their student exit survey data. [Institution name] will use the merged information for statistical purposes in analyzing graduate programs.  Your institution pledges that any findings based on these surveys will be reported in a manner that does not personally identify you or other individuals. Also, [institution name] will combine these data with similar data from other research universities. All direct personal identifiers (such as name, birth date, last four digits of social security number) will be removed before the data are shared with other universities. Researchers at the participating universities will study the combined SED-exit survey data as part of on-going efforts to improve graduate education in the United States. The following link lists the universities involved in this research effort: xxxxx.

If you do not want your SED data merged with exit survey data from [institution name] or do not want it shared with other AAU universities, please check the box below:

I do not want my SED data merged or shared with other AAU universities