Students and Faculty Report Their Academic Experiences

By HamPoll Staff

Between November 8th and 11th, 437 students and 69 faculty members participated in an online survey administered by Hamilton’s Polling Organization to study student and faculty opinions of a variety of important academic topics. Results showed 59% of respondents do not believe the college provides them with enough information about courses before registration begins. As a result, 62% of students support requiring the provision of a class syllabus before registration begins. Similarly, 60% of students believe professors’ course evaluations should be made public. On the other hand, only 7% and 3% of faculty members support these two requirements respectively. An area of agreement is requiring Writing-Intensive courses, which has the support of 79% of students and 91% of faculty members. Additionally, only 10% of students and 23% of faculty members think that Sophomore Seminars should be required, showing the massive campus-wide support for getting rid of this requirement. Finally, 41% of student and faculty respondents support the introduction of Oral-Intensive course requirements.

Percentage of students and faculty who said the following should be required	STUDENTS	FACULTY
Providing a syllabus before registration	62%	7%
Making course evaluations public	60%	3%
Sophomore seminars	23%	10%
Writing-intensive courses	79%	91%
Oral-intensive courses	41%	41%

The survey also asked students how often they have violated the Honor Code. The table below shows the break down by major. Results include respondents who said they rarely, sometimes, or frequently violated the Honor Code. Since violating the Honor Code can take many forms, and is not limited to courses within a student’s major, we cannot know what courses suffer the most from these violations.

Fifity-one percent of Economics majors or intended majors reported violating the Honor Code at least rarely. This is contrasted with 13% of History majors reporting violating the Honor Code. It is important to note here that Economics is the most popular major on campus with almost 16.5% of student majors. However, only 8.25% of our sample are Economics majors which may be due to the fact that students were asked to select only one major and many Economics majors selected their second major instead. In addition, differences in percentages between some of the majors such as Natural Sciences and Other Social Sciences (which excludes Economics, Government, and History), are relatively small making it difficult to confirm their statistical significance.

Another major result from the survey includes that 88% of the student body are either satisfied or very satisfied with the performance of professors in their department. On the other hand, only 74% of students said that there were enough resources, such as classes or faculty among others, available for them to use in their department. The break down by department is shown in the table below. We notice that 43% of Economics majors and 82% of Arts majors reported having a lack of resources while 91% of Natural Science majors said that they have enough, or more than enough resources for them to use in their departments. Furthermore, more than 90% of Language and Social Science majors (excluding Economics, Government, and History) said they were satisfied with the performance of professors in their department.

Major/Intended major	Percentage of students who said they violated the Honor Code	Number of respondents
Economics	51%	37
Psychology	47%	30
Humanities	40%	53
Languages	38%	21
Natural Sciences	33%	109
Other Social Sciences	33%	36
Mathematics & Computer Science	30%	33
Government/World Politics/Public Policy	27%	82
History	13%	24
Arts	9%	11

Major/ Intended major	Student satisfaction with professors	Student satisfaction with resources
Other Social Sciences	91.7%	67%
Languages	90.5%	81%
Mathematics & Computer Science	87.9%	67%
Natural Sciences	84.4%	91%
Government/World Politics/Public Policy	84.1%	78%
Psychology	83.3%	87%
History	83.3%	75%
Economics	75.7%	57%
Humanities	75.5%	58%
Arts	45.5%	18%

HamPoll Pre-Election Survey Proves Most Students are White, Rich and From the Northeast

By HamPoll Staff

Indeed, 89% of the 301 respondents described themselves as white, 40% reported family incomes of above $150,000 (with only 10% below $40,000) and 79% were from the Northeast. While this somewhat humorous result may not be surprising, this superficially homogeneous group expressed diverse and often surprising opinions.

The 301 respondents identified themselves as 62% Democratic and 20% Republican (the remaining 18% comprised Green, Libertarian, Independent and all other parties) . Atheists and agnostics made up 29%, Protestants 24% and Catholics 23%. 42% of respondents identified themselves as social science majors, revealing a slight bias in the sample base. Humanities students were second most interested, totaling 25% of the respondents. Students of the arts, foreign languages and mathematics and computer science totaled only 15% in comparison.

Two questions in particular revealed some of the most interesting results. The first asked students to identify how important they perceived a number of current issues to be. These issues, which included taxation, the state of the economy, social issues, racial equality, the war, etc., were all considered either “somewhat important” or “very important” by the majority of students. The two issues that the most students judged as “not important” the most often were immigration and social issues such as stem cell research and abortion. Unsurprisingly, Republicans found taxation to be more important than did Democrats, and Democrats favored social issues and the environment. That Republicans also felt more concerned about the economy is out of agreement with nationwide trends; this can perhaps be explained by the disproportionate amount of wealthy students here at Hamilton.

The last question asked respondents to choose which out of several countries they found most dangerous for global security. Not surprisingly, 45% of students chose North Korea. What interested the staff was the second most popular choice, the United States; this choice, at 26% of the answer total, ranked higher than Iran at 20%. Upon further analysis, it was discovered that while only 5% of those who voted for Bush in 2004 feared the U.S., a whopping 30% of Kerry voters held this view. Apparently Bush’s controversial handling of the various problems in the Middle East has had a drastic effect on the way many Americans perceive their country.