Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Graduate Student Survey



The National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) has
recently received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to conduct a
survey of doctoral students on their graduate school experiences. The
survey will be completed on the Web <http://survey.nagps.org/> by current
and recent doctoral students from January - May 2000, and the results made
publicly available on the Web on a department specific basis in September.

This effort is a follow-up to a more limited survey which occurred this
past spring, which was aimed at science and engineering doctoral students.
The aggregate results from that survey are available at
<http://www.phds.org/survey/results/>.

The survey we are conducting is unique in at least two important ways: it
collects information on a department-specific basis, not only averaged
over entire institutions or disciplines (though discipline-level results
will also be available). So it will be possible to look at, for instance,
responses from individual physics programs, or to rank history departments
based on faculty mentoring. And it makes this data publicly available on
the Internet in Fall 2000. So we'll be opening the door about the
situation in individual departments for wider viewing by graduate students,
prospective students, faculty, administrators, etc.

The survey is based upon best practices and covers issues in a number of
areas, including information for prospective students, curriculum breadth
and flexibility, career guidance and placement services, faculty mentoring,
time to degree, department climate, teaching, professionalism,
and overall satisfaction. In other words, the sort of best practices and
concerns outside of the reputation. The NAGPS survey itself will run from
January 18-May 1, 2000, and will be available on the Web at
<http://survey.nagps.org/>
(which already has a number of resources).

For this survey to be useful, it is vital that we reach as many current and
recent doctoral students (anyone who has been enrolled for at least
one semester in the past five years) as possible. We are hoping that we
can encourage a significant percentage of students to respond so that the
results will represent a broad range of experiences and a realistic picture
of department and institutional practices.


Adam Fagen, Chair
Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty-Student Relations
National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS)

NAGPS Web: http://www.nagps.org/
The National Doctoral Program Survey: http://survey.nagps.org/

Adam Fagen \ afagen@fas.harvard.edu
Molecular Biology/Education / http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~afagen/
Harvard University GSAS \ http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/