Residence halls are some of the busiest buildings on campus. Organized digital inspection checklists can help your team stay on top of their priorities during the school year and be prepared for a fast, efficient turn season.
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Custodial service, maintenance, grounds care, safety inspections, and renovation all must be done in spaces where students live, work, study, and socialize. University housing professionals make sure all of this behind-the-scenes work gets done to support the student experience. An overarching residence hall inspection checklist helps ensure no area is slipping through the cracks.
A general student housing inspection covers a wide range of facility needs with a general survey. It’s designed to be completed by a residence hall or student life official to get a general sense of the residence hall’s quality levels, as well as to flag specific areas of concern.
This inspection form can (and should) be edited to fit your residence hall’s specific needs. For example, if you have areas such as dining halls, laundry rooms, or workout facilities within your space, you’ll want to add those to the list.
Routine student housing inspections should be completed often to catch problems before they escalate. This general inspection is designed to be performed on a weekly or monthly basis. Doing a general survey of residence hall facility quality reveals areas that require more specific and frequent inspections.
Switching from paper forms to a digital inspection process gave the residential services team at Northwestern University better data to improve their processes and make a case for more funding.
“Before we started with OrangeQC, we were using paper as an inspection process, and there was no true way to track any progress or document problems,” Jonathan Winters, Associate Director of Operations and Services, told us when we interviewed him about the change. “A lot of times, the inspections would be submitted, but then they’d get lost in the black hole.”
The way student housing inspection works varies depending on the type of inspection, the area being inspected, and the team doing the inspection. There are three types of areas to consider:
If reasonable, give notice to all of the room’s residents ahead of time. Be sure to knock and call in to identify yourself, then pause and wait for a response before unlocking a door. In general, residence hall inspections should be targeted at specific issues and not involve opening any personal items, including drawers and closets.
The industry is shifting away from paper-based forms, but some university teams will still find these useful.
Digital forms are the gold standard for a reason, though. Paper forms tend to pile up or get lost. Teams that use paper forms often must input them into a spreadsheet or some kind of digital system, which creates extra work (and doesn’t always happen in a timely manner).
A good digital inspection app allows real-time residence hall inspection reporting and automatically aggregates overall performance and trends. Photos are a hugely useful tool, building transparency into the process and making it easier to pinpoint problems. Timestamps and GPS also create a digital log of inspections to validate service and document problems.
The best rating scale depends on the type of residence hall inspection, its purpose, and the team performing the inspection.
Campus facilities and maintenance teams will likely be familiar with the APPA levels, which are useful for measuring quality against a goal or SLA. If you have RAs or other student employees performing inspections, however, they will not be familiar with this rating system.
For many campus housing inspections, a pass/fail rating works well. While this rating doesn’t capture much nuance, it’s quick and helps bring problem areas to the top of your priority list.
A 1–3 rating (below/meets/exceeds expectations) can add a bit more detail to your inspection results and will also be more intuitive for student employees. For consistent results, provide context about what each rating looks like for each line item. This can be done via notes, photos, or in-person training.
Residence hall inspections help student life and housing teams meet their goals for campus housing facilities. They lay out the expectations for areas including cleaning, maintenance, and safety so that the team can measure performance, celebrate successes, and target shortcomings.
In its 2020 edition of Standards & Ethical Principles for College & University Housing Professionals, the Association of College & University Housing Officers – International (ACUHO-I) spells out six areas of residential facilities administration. These include:
Student housing audits seek to measure how the teams that manage these areas are performing. They ensure that any gaps in the facilities plan are identified and remedied.
When student housing checks uncover a problem that needs correcting, the team responsible should be notified as soon as possible and with as much detail as possible. Photos and descriptions of the issue can help ensure the right person to fix the issue shows up with the right tools to do the job.
Some educational inspection software, including OrangeQC, can be automatically set to create a ticket or work order when a line item gets a failing score.
Plain view inspections cover only what the inspector sees when they enter the room, without touching or moving items or furniture. Depending on the established policies, student housing inspectors may be able to shift furniture just enough to be able to see potential issues, but they shouldn’t open drawers and look through personal items.
Student housing move-out inspection form & checkout inspection checklist Turn season demands efficiency. Prepare your team to handle the logistics with an organized move-out inspection checklist. Download the Student Housing Move-Out Inspection Form (PDF) Download
