The College has made public the results of the most recent Senior Survey, a questionnaire offered bi-annually to graduating students to assess their Dartmouth experience. This is the first time the College has released this information.
The results of the 2006 Senior Survey have been put on the Dartmouth web site in order to make the information "readily available" and increase "transparency," Heather Kim, director of Institutional Research, said.
Ninety-one percent of the Class of 2006 responded that they were either "very satisfied or generally satisfied" with their undergraduate education. At least 60 percent of respondents reported that they were the most satisfied with study abroad programs, the availability of faculty and quality of instruction, library facilities and extracurricular activities on campus.
Students were least satisfied with academic advising, student government, career counseling, administrators' responsiveness to students, health and psychological services and the climate for minority students on campus.
The survey is administered to graduating seniors every other year. The College has data from these surveys from the past decade, which have been summarized on the Dartmouth web site.
Previously, the survey results were shared only with the College administration and the Board of Trustees, according to Kim. The survey has been kept confidential in previous years because there has only recently been a push to make it available to the public, Kim said.
"It's more of a recent phenomenon that people are interested in this data," she said. "There's not much of a difference in terms of how we use it."
Multiple students contacted Kim recently, urging her to make the survey results available to the public, she said.
Former Student Body President Travis Green '08 became interested in making the survey results available after hearing administrators refer to it during various meetings he attended as student body president and a member of Paleopitus Senior Society.
Paleopitus pushed for the release of the survey results because they thought that the results would help educate the student body and alumni, Green said.
Part of the group's motivation to make the results public was to prevent false data from circulating, Green said.
"I'm a firm believer that information should be free," Green said, noting that he thought this sentiment was contrary to the "culture of the College."
"I think the College should be more transparent," Green said. "It will help us to acknowledge problems, which is much healthier than what we're doing now."
The Office of Institutional Research did not advertise the survey's availability online as they should have, Green said.
Dartmouth is one of many liberal arts schools that participate in the survey, although all other cooperating schools are anonymous. The other schools' results are compiled so Dartmouth is able to compare its own scores with the others. In order to maintain confidentiality, Institutional Research grouped the other institutions by qualifying features and labeled them as Peer One, Two and Three institutions. Peer One consists of "highly selective, co-ed liberal arts colleges," Peer Two is "highly selective private institutions in the Northeast" and Peer Three is "highly selective, private institutions beyond Northeast," according to the web site.
The feedback the survey provides is helpful to the administration, according to Dean of the College Tom Crady, who added that he is already working to improve the aspects of the College with which students were least satisfied. Crady also commented on the high percentage of students who said they were more than satisfied with their Dartmouth experience, both in the survey and to him personally.
"That's an unusual thing to hear so consistently," Crady said.
Kim emphasized that although the survey is very helpful for understanding how to improve the College, it should not be taken as absolute fact.
"Other data points are needed to define the overall Dartmouth experience," Kim said.
