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% |
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