Reality check: survey gives schools news they can use.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch was famous for asking his constituents, "How am I doing?" Now, the growing popularity of a toot called the National Survey of Student Engagement, sponsored by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, Bloomington, gives colleges and universities a chance to do the same. "What we're trying to do is give institutions and the wider public a window into what actually happens in college--those things linked to learning," says George Kuh, the NSSE director. "We're trying to figure out how well those things are working given the goats and purposes of undergraduate education."

The national benchmark gives schools an indication of how well they perform compared with schools of similar size or characteristics and, more important, find ways to improve their weaknesses.

The 2003 report, called Converting Data into Action, is based on information from 185,000 first-year and senior students at 649 different four-year colleges and universities. The actual results from individual schools are confidential and are shared only with the schools themselves. What the public sees is an aggregate of the results ranked by size and type of school.

The survey results provide comparative standards for determining how effectively colleges are contributing to learning. The NSSE survey is based on 41 key questions in five benchmark areas: level of academic challenge; active and collaborative learning; student-faculty interaction; enriching educational experiences; and supportive campus environment. So what did this year's survey reveal?

* College athletes are generally as engaged in learning activities as are other students

* Men are generally less engaged than women, especially in the areas of academic challenge and enriching educational experiences

* Less than half of seniors frequently have serious conversations with students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds

* More than one-third of all seniors only occasionally get prompt feedback from faculty members

* Student experiences vary greatly by major field, with students in professional areas such as architecture and health sciences reporting higher levels of engagement than other fields

* Two-fifths of all students report A grades, and only 3 percent of students have C or tower average grades. A third of the students earning A grades study only 10 or fewer hours per week

What these results indicate, says Kuh, is that schools can improve their quality by focusing on the performance of the least engaged students. "We can't do anything about the SAT scores of incoming students, or the money we get from the states--that's out of our control--but we can do something about the quality of the student experience. We can adjust things so that we do more active collaborative learning in the classroom and give students more experiences to apply their learning."

The full report is available in PDF format from NSSE's Web site: www.iub.edu/~nsse.