Evaluating academic programs has become an integral part of developing and improving various programs at undergraduate as well as graduate and postgraduate university levels. One of the problems in assessing the quality of university level programs is the fact that most assessment programs rely on student satisfaction surveys only (Hurt, 2004). However, academic programs involve some other dimensions which should be considered in the evaluation process with student satisfaction being only one of them. Other dimensions include meeting the students’ desired outcomes, their relationship with the advisors (Szymanska, 2011) and the variable of the course instructors’ as well as the thesis advisors’ experience (Cuseo, 2003). Furthermore, a comprehensive assessment of academic programs should include a variety of qualitative and quantitative assessment tools. The use of open-ended questions and focus groups are the recommended procedures for general questionnaire design proposed by Brown (2001), Dörnyei (2003) and Demetriou (2005). Ready made instruments cannot always serve the purpose of evaluating specific academic programs. The necessary steps i academic program evaluation, therefore, involve designing instruments that provide enough information for program improvement. From 2006 to 2014 the Doctoral program in foreign language education (FLE) at the FHSS (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences), University of Zagreb (henceforth the Program) was evaluated with the instruments designed by the Program directors. Although the previously used questionnaires managed to reflect the complex picture of the multitude of dimensions encompassed by the Program, they were not validated instruments. Therefore, in 2014 the evaluation underwent considerable changes. The idea was to recruit the students themselves in the process of collecting the necessary information about what needs to be included in the new assessment protocol and instrument design. After a period of brainstorming sessions and collaborative meetings between students and the faculty members involved in the Program, a decision was made to design a new questionnaire for evaluating the Program. The aim of this paper is to describe the process of designing the above-mentioned questionnaire.