Officials hope to get more input

After four years of what some say was confusion, frustration and misunderstanding with the UA General Education requirements, graduating seniors were given a chance to rate the UA online.

The Survey of Graduating Seniors is a fifty-question survey that started in 1997, which asks universal campus questions about students' experiences while at the UA.

The survey has recently been revamped to compile student criticism and praise about General Education courses, as well as the overall quality of the university.

This year marks the first year that the survey, administered by Assessment and Enrollment Research, was available exclusively online. The link to the survey was e-mailed to graduating seniors beginning in the fall and AER officials said they hope the web-availability will increase feedback.

"We really want to give students a voice," said Gwendolyn Johnson, assistant director for AER, who added that in previous years, when the survey was available both in paper form and on the Web, only about 30-35 percent of the graduating class, or 1,000 - 1,200 students, submitted the survey.

"We want to know about student satisfaction, what worked and what didn't," said Rick Kroc, director of AER.

Many students took advantage of the survey to voice their likes, dislikes and other concerns with the Gen Ed program.

Regional development senior Jason Satterly answered that, if the university could make one improvement, it would be to cut down the number of Gen Ed classes required for graduation. Satterly added that the courses often seemed irrelevant to his major and future career plans.

"I'm a regional development major. When am I ever going to use what I learned in my oceanography class?" Satterly said about one Gen Ed course he took.

"Overall, the Gen Ed classes give me useless education. It's a waste of money," he added.

Satterly said he voiced his concerns when filling out the survey, but other students said they didn't know there was any real importance to the survey.

December graduate Stewart Chamberlain said he filled out so many questionnaires, surveys and other paperwork that he doesn't remember putting much thought into the survey.

"I was on survey overload by the time I got to that one, I'm sure," Chamberlain said.

In response to concerns like Chamberlain's, AER is also working alongside individual

departments and colleges to add additional questions about students' experiences in their specific major to reduce the number of surveys students are asked to fill out.

"It can be hard to get genuine feedback in large departments and colleges," Johnson said, and he added that departments have found it difficult to administer surveys and hopes adding the questions to the senior survey will help increase response rates.

The departmental questions have been requested this year by only a few departments that want to know the impact of their instructors and effectiveness of courses in order to make positive changes.

"It's a co-operative effort with the administrative office and we think it will work quite well," Johnson said.

In addition to this year's changes of the senior survey, next fall will see even more efforts by AER to generate student response.

Beginning in the fall, completion of the senior survey will be required as part of the degree-check process.

"If we can get more students to respond, the results will be more relevant," Kroc said.

Although both Johnson and Kroc said that past senior survey results have been used to make minor campus adjustments, no major changes have been made thus far. Kroc added that the new Gen Ed questions will likely yield the most future changes, but the current results are too recent to have an effect.