Marques, FrancielleHernández-Leo, DaviniaCastillo, Carlos2025-04-142025-04-142025Marques F, Hernández-Leo D, Castillo C. Beyond bias in student satisfaction surveys: exploring the role of grades and satisfaction with the learning design. J New Approaches Educ Res. 2025 March;14(1):9. DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00030-32254-7339http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70140Course satisfaction surveys play a relevant role in Higher Education, aiding in the quality assessment of courses and informing academic promotions. Nonetheless, understanding potential biases and influential factors within these surveys is crucial to their equitable utilization within universities. This study delves into a deconstruction of satisfaction ratings considering three learning design factors (content, methodology, and workload) and their interplay with student grades. Especially emphasizing the need for institutional analytics to engage in Generative Uncertainty, aiding productive inquiries using data. Institutional analytics of the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 survey results from a Spanish university revealed that learning design aspects strongly correlate with students’ holistic perception of a course. The correlation between student grades and student satisfaction related to learning design is either weak or moderate. These analytical findings imply that there may be bias in students’ responses to course satisfaction surveys (e.g., lower grades leading to lower satisfaction). However, this bias doesn’t consistently manifest.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the mate‑rial. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00030-3Learning designLearning environmentLearner satisfactionInstitutional analyticsBiasesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess