In fact, 95 percent of our student surveys are now completed online. We've surveyed anywhere from 26 men at Deep Springs College (100 percent of the student body) to over 1,000 collegians at such colleges as Hofstra University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So how do we do it? First, we notify our administrative contacts at the schools we'd like to survey. We depend upon these contacts for assistance either in informing the student body of our online survey, or, if the school opts for a paper version, in identifying common, high-traffic areas on campus at which to survey students, and to help us make any necessary arrangements as required by campus policies. In recent years, an increasing number of schools have chosen to send an e-mail to the entire student body about the availability of the online survey; in some cases this has yielded astonishing response rates.
Surveying truly is a continuous process. Students can submit surveys online at any time (though our site will accept only one per academic year per student, to prevent any stuffing of the ballot box). We also officially survey students at each school in Best 368 Colleges at least once every three years. Early on (we've been conducting these surveys since 1992) we surveyed all colleges and universities in the book on an annual basis. But we soon found that unless there's been some grand upheaval or administrative change on campus, there's little shift in student opinion from one year to the next. Shifts tend to emerge in a third or fourth year, as surveyed students leave or matriculate. With this in mind, we switched to a three-year cycle for resurveying. We survey colleges more often than that if the colleges request that we do so (and we can accommodate that request) or if we believe it is necessary for one reason or another. And of course, online surveys submitted by students outside of schools' normal survey cycles are always factored into the subsequent year's ranking calculations, so that the surveying process truly is ongoing.
The survey has more than 80 questions in four main sections: "About Yourself," "Your School's Academics/Administration," "Students," and "Life at Your School." We ask about all sorts of things, from "How many out-of-class hours do you spend studying each day?" to "How do you rate your campus food?" Most questions offer an answer choice on a five-point scale: students fill in one of five boxes on a grid with headers varying by topic (e.g. a range from “Excellent” to “Awful”). Some questions are open-ended and offer students the opportunity to expand on their answers with narrative responses.
Once the surveys have been completed and the responses stored in our database, we tally the results. Our methodology and the math by which we calculate our ranking results is quite simple. Each college is given a score (similar to a GPA) for its students' answers to each multiple-choice question. These scores enable us to compare student opinion from college to college. They are the sole factors that determine which schools make it onto our 62 ranking lists. It’s what students report to us about their experiences and how they rate their own colleges on various topics that determines whether a school makes it onto any of our lists, and at what rank. (The ranking lists are not based on our opinion of the schools or how we rate them.) See The Princeton Review's College Rankings for info on what each ranking list is based on.
The findings from our student surveys also determine the "Students Say" lists we feature in the sidebars on our school profiles. These lists report the topics on the surveys that students at each school agreed about the most. Our profiles are also packed with comments from students (all text in quotes in the profiles comes directly from a surveyed student). Student quotations in our profiles are not chosen for their extreme nature, humor or unique perspective. Rather, they are chosen because they represent the sentiments expressed by the majority of survey respondents from the college; or, they illustrate one side or another of a mixed bag of student opinion, in which case there will also appear a counterpoint within the text. And, of course, if testimonials accomplish this and are noteworthy for their wittiness, they'll be very likely to make it into the text.
Our ranking lists, school profiles and the student comments we share in them seek to accomplish that which a college admissions viewbook by its very nature can never really achieve—an uncensored view of life at a particular college, crafted in recognition of the fact that not every college will appeal to every student. But that is the beauty of it. These are all very different schools with many different and wonderful things to offer. Our profiles and rankings aim to help students and parents answer that all-important question—"What is the best college for me?"
One last note: In order to guard against producing a write-up that's off the mark for any particular college, before we publish our Best Colleges books we send our administrative contact at each school a copy of the profile we intend to publish. They then have ample opportunity to respond with corrections, comments and/or outright objections. We take careful measures to review the school's suggestions against the student survey data we collected and make appropriate changes when warranted.
After they have taken the survey, we ask students to review the information we published about their school in the previous year and grade us on its accuracy and validity. Year after year we've gotten high marks: Last year, 81 percent of students said our profile on their school was “extremely” or “very” accurate.
We hope you enjoy reading the information we've collected for each school in the 2009 edition of Best 368 Colleges. We've worked hard to make each school's profile an accurate representation of student sentiment on its campus.
We wish you good luck in your college applications and we hope that wherever you end up going to college, you’ll come back and tell us what you think about it at http://survey.review.com.
