1996 Survey Results

This page presents the results of a Fall 1996 survey of graduate student opinions on the quality of graduate education at Michigan State University

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In the Fall of 1996, the Graduate School undertook a survey of all graduate and graduate professional students. In preparing the questions, we made use of similar surveys from other institutions plus our own exit survey and we shared drafts with the University Graduate Council, the Graduate Assistant and Associate Deans group, the Council of Graduate Students and a number of faculty who have professional expertise in survey methodology.

The survey was divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of 30 questions, was intended for students who had been enrolled in graduate school at MSU for more than one year. The second part, consisting of 8 questions, was for students who had been enrolled for less than one year. Respondents were also given the opportunity to provide written comments.

The purpose of the survey was to obtain opinions from graduate students about their graduate programs both to provide direction for departments to improve the student's experience and to serve as a baseline to measure future progress.

The survey was distributed in two modes; one a paper survey including a scoring sheet which was distributed through department offices and the second on the World Wide Web. Both modes required an authentic PID to be counted. We called attention to the survey both by advertisements in the State News and by an e-mail note to graduate students. Strict confidentiality was guaranteed so that in presenting the results we are suppressing any cells which have less than 5 respondents.

Overall there were about 1500 total responses and about 1400 valid responses from the 6500 masters and doctoral students at MSU. Of the valid responses, 1026 were from graduate students who had been enrolled for more than one year and 365 were from "new" students. Somewhat surprising to me at least was the fact that of the 1500 total responses, over 900 were submitted electronically from the WWW. I believe that this would not have been the case a year ago and that in one more year, perhaps a paper form would not be needed at all. About one third of the respondents elected to provide written comments.

On the advice of some of our survey experts, we included a number of "negative" questions but for clarity and consistency in presenting the results, we have "flipped" these questions (and the scoring) back to positive so that in general the scores now run in the same direction, viz. where "strongly agree" is a positive answer and scores as a one. Thus, in general, low scores correspond to a positive response.

The results of this survey are presented in two ways: First the total responses of both groups are given as "pie charts" and second the average score for each question is plotted as a bar graph by College. The standard errors in the mean scores vary somewhat by college and by question but a good rule of thumb is that the error in the mean is less than 0.1 for large colleges and about 0.15 for small colleges.

Our intention is to analyze the responses at the department level also and to share these results with the appropriate deans and departments, provided we have 5 or more responses for any given department. We plan to discuss the results where appropriate both to help solve any problems that may be identified and also to look at areas of success with the hope of transferring good practices in one unit across the whole university.

Summary of Results

• Overall the message from the survey is quite positive. The majority of the respondents are generally positive about their graduate experience.

  For example, 74% of "experienced" students strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that they would recommend their program to prospective students and only 11% disagreed or disagreed strongly with this statement (Q1). Interestingly, the percent of positive responses is even higher (84% for Q41 identical to Q1) among new students. The longer one spends in graduate school the more problems one sees, maybe not too surprisingly. This pattern is generally born out in the responses to many of the questions although one sees various, sometimes large, fractions of neutral responses.

• Nevertheless the small percentage of negative responses should not be overlooked, particularly in those cases where the percentage of negative responses rises above 20%.

  For example, higher than 20% overall negative responses are seen for Q6, 7, 9 and 18, which all involve communication or supervision of various kinds.

• There appears to be reasonable consistency between Q1 and Q28 both in the overall results and in the pattern of responses for the different colleges. These questions should measure similar points of view. Q1 asks if students would "recommend this program to prospective students" and Q28 asks if "MSU has been a good choice for graduate school".
• There are not large variations in the responses in mean scores from college to college although in detail some variations do appear to be significant.
• More students are satisfied (44%) with the interdisciplinary opportunities available at MSU than are not satisfied (21%) although there are a large number of neutral responses (35%) to this question. (Q21)
• More students are also satisfied with the library holdings (58%) than are dissatisfied (28%) although there are significant variations in the response to this question (Q23) from students in different colleges.
• Students are fairly evenly divided in their satisfaction with computer facilities available to graduate students (44% satisfied, 39% not satisfied) and this does vary somewhat with college. (Q20)
• Students who expressed opinions are satisfied with Graduate School services (41% positive compared to 8% dissatisfied) but a majority of students do not appear to know about Graduate School services (51% neutral response).(Q22)

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