What it does

The form template builder lets administrators create evaluation and survey forms in a guided, step-by-step flow: name and configure the form, add questions, and set up how it gets assigned. Each template belongs to a program, institution, or organization, and stays in draft until you publish it and it starts powering evaluations, surveys, or self-assessments across the platform.

Who it's for

Program administrators building forms for their program, institution administrators building institution-wide forms, and organization administrators building forms shared across the organization — each governed by separate view, create, and edit permissions.

How it works

You start a new form from the templates list. The builder walks you through four steps. The tabs are labeled Basic Setup, Manage Questions, Set Assignment Rules, and Simulate:

Basic Setup — name, description, active status, activation date, and form type (compact tiles). Privacy, review, and alerts each sit in their own card under a live behavior summary. Optional extras (signature, unable-to-assess, score display, and rotation prior-forms) stay collapsed until you open Additional Settings, or until an extra is already on. Here you decide whether submissions are confidential (responder identities hidden), whether a review process runs, who is alerted, whether a signature is required, and whether recipients see score values.
Manage Questions — assemble the form from sections and questions. You can pull existing questions from the shared question bank or create new ones, reorder them by dragging, mark questions as required, and organize them into collapsible sections.
Set Assignment Rules — define who completes the form, who it is about, and when it should be assigned (covered in detail in the assignment rules article).
Simulate — preview who would be paired if a rule ran. This does not send the form. Finish on this step publishes the template.

Draft, publish, deactivate. While a form is in draft, only administrators see it; publishing makes it available for assignment. Deactivating a published form later stops new assignments without losing existing responses.

Reveal threshold. For confidential forms, set a reveal threshold: responder identities stay hidden until a minimum number of responses has been collected (three by default), and optionally until a number of days has passed.

Duplicating. You can duplicate any template as a starting point. The duplicate carries over the sections, questions, confidentiality settings, assignment rules, and review rules of the original, with "(Copy)" appended to the name.

Before you start

You need permission to create templates, not only to view them. Without create permission, you are sent to an access-denied page.
This walkthrough is the program administration portal. Open Forms → Templates. Institution users who are on the Institution Forms tab see Create Institution Form instead of Create Form. Organization-scoped templates are managed with Share, Unlock, and Relock — not this builder.
If Form Templates is empty, you are in the right place: create the first one. If you only have view permission, ask a program administrator to create it or grant create access.
Pick the form type that matches how the evaluation is triggered: Rotation, Course, Session, Event, Program, General, or Shift. A course evaluation is a Course form. A committee or program-level review is usually Program or General — there is no separate committee type.
If this is a small-cohort or multi-source review (faculty on a resident, peer-to-peer), turn on confidential submissions on Basic Setup before you publish. Identities stay hidden until the reveal threshold (three responses by default).

Do this

Open Forms → Templates (/forms/templates) — you should see the Form Templates page with status tabs.
Stay on the Active tab (the Create Form button is on this tab) and click Create Form — you should see Create New Form and the Basic Setup step.
Enter a Name, select a form type tile, set confidentiality and other behavior on this page if you need them, then click Save & Continue — you should see the Manage Questions step.
Add at least one question from the bank or create a new one. If the bank is empty, create the question here. Click the Continue to Rules button — you should see Set Assignment Rules.
Add an assignment rule if this form should go out on a schedule; you can also finish without a rule and assign later. Click Complete Setup — you should see the Simulate page. Simulation previews pairs; it does not send the form.
Click the Finish button — you should see the Form Templates page again, and the template is published so it can be assigned.

You're done when

The template appears on Form Templates.
You can assign it with a rule, a manual/batch assignment, or both — assigning is a separate job and does not happen when you click Finish.

Boundaries and limits

Viewing, creating, and editing templates each require a separate permission. Users without the right permission are redirected to an access-denied page.
A template is owned by exactly one scope — a program, an institution, or an organization. It does not appear in other programs unless it is explicitly shared or copied there.
You cannot publish a form that contains a choice-based question (rating, scale, dropdown, multi-select, checkbox, or yes/no) with no answer options. Publishing is blocked with a message listing the affected questions.
Deleting a template is a soft delete performed by an authorized action; it removes the form from lists but does not erase historical data.
Templates that were shared to you as a locked standard cannot have their content edited (see the template sharing article).
The builder does not send anything by itself — assignments and notifications only happen through assignment rules, manual assignment, or batch assignment.

Common questions

Q: Can I edit a form after it has been published? A: Yes. You can reopen the builder for a published form. Be aware that content changes affect how future responses are collected; existing submitted responses are not altered.

Q: What happens when I deactivate a form? A: The form returns to draft status and stops being available for new assignments. Existing assignments and responses are unaffected.

Q: Can I reuse questions across forms? A: Yes. Questions live in a shared question bank, and the builder lets you add existing bank questions to any form.

Q: Why can't I publish my form? A: The most common cause is a choice-based question with no answer options. The error message names the questions you need to fix.

Q: I finished the builder — why has nobody received the form? A: Finish publishes the template so it can be assigned. It does not send it. Use assignment rules, or manual or batch assignment, after the template exists.

Q: The Create Form button is missing. A: It appears on the Active tab for people with create permission. On other status tabs, change back to Active. If you still do not see it, you can view templates but cannot create them.

Building Form Templates