OIE surveys to gauge academic, career resources

By Andrew Ligeralde     2/24/15 2:05pm

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness is administering three surveys to Rice University undergraduates this spring. According to John Cornwell, associate vice president of the OIE, the Survey of All Students, Senior Exit Survey and Consortium on Financing Higher Education Enrolled Students Survey will be used to gauge student satisfaction with current academic and career resources.

“Documenting what students currently are doing with internships, externships, research and such is very important to these initiative as Rice plans to increase these experiences and learn from our current best practices,” Cornwell said.

The SAS, which was also released in fall 2014, asks about the university’s teaching, learning and research opportunities to help formulate a plan for the Student Association’s Rice Education of the Future Initiative. Cornwell said he hopes this round of the SAS will expand on the fall results and help the OIE meet the demand for extracurricular learning.

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“The results supported the president’s view that undergraduate students value experiential and other out-of-classroom experiences and see them as very important to their Rice education,” Cornwell said. “With the new SA Initiative on the educational experience at Rice and the Office of Development’s ‘Initiative for Students,’ the interest in students’ out-of-classes learning has increased substantially.”

In addition to the SAS, which will be sent to all undergraduates, the OIE will release the SES to all students graduating this spring. According to OIE Senior Survey Administrator Angela Thompson, the SES will ask, among other questions, whether students would still choose to come to Rice if they were entering college today and if there are any changes they would have made to their experience. 

As with any survey process, a barrier the OIE faces is student apathy. According to Thompson, the OIE has eliminated this problem by placing holds on student accounts until they complete the surveys.

“Overall, we typically receive between a 96 to 98 percent response rate for the Senior Exit Survey and the Survey of All Students,” Thompson said.

However, not all students are comfortable taking mandatory surveys. Joelle Whyte, a Baker College freshman, said she finds the practice problematic. 

“I think there’s a better way for them to convince us,” Whyte said. “They could bribe us with incentives like gift cards, like I’ve seen been done before. I’d definitely take it then.” 

Unlike the SAS and SES, the ESS is not mandatory and sent only to a representative sample containing 33 percent of Rice undergraduates. According to Thompson, the responses measure student satisfaction and are compared to those from several peer institutions, including Stanford, Duke and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

“We generated a list using a stratified sample method based on gender, ethnicity and matriculation year,” Thompson said. “This ensures the sample is reflective of the university.”

While all students are guaranteed to receive at least one survey this spring, not all students are clear on their purpose. Becca Hsu, a Jones College sophomore, said she has not been satisfied with the undergraduate survey process. 

“The surveys would be nice if we actually knew what they were used for,” Hsu said. “I don’t feel that invested in them because I don’t get how they are being used in the decision making.” 

Thompson said that while the results are not available to individual students, they are sent to the departments that use the data for program improvement.

“Program-level reports are provided to each program chair regarding how their students answered the major specific questions from the Senior Exit Survey,” Thompson said. “Copies of the reports are also sent to the Dean of Undergraduates as well as the Center for Teaching Excellence.”

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