THE SURVEYS: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WERE DONE
 The NSSE and CUSC surveys, which were commissioned by the universities, ask more than 150 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.
The U.S.-based NSSE began in 1999 and is distributed to first- and senior-year students. NSSE is not primarily a student satisfaction survey, but is rather a study of best-educa¬tional practices, and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those best practices. In 2004, 11 Canadian universities participated for the first time in NSSE, with 14,267 students completing the survey. By 2006, that number had grown to approximately 60,000 students at 31 Canad¬ian institutions. Seventeen universities or their affiliates participated in the 2007 NSSE, representing roughly 14,000 students—fewer than in 2006 because most institutions conduct the NSSE survey every two years.
The NSSE results are headlined by the Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, created by NSSE to compare performance across all universities—American and Can¬adian—in five key areas: Level of Academic Challenge, Student-Faculty Interaction, Active and Collaborative Learning, Enrich¬ing Educational Experience, and Supportive Campus Environment. Each school’s bench¬mark result was calculated by NSSE, based on student responses to a variety of questions. NSSE also asked two important student satis¬faction questions; school-by-school results appear on the following pages.
CUSC was created in 1994; it is a Canada-only survey, and unlike NSSE, it is in large part a student satisfaction survey. In 2007, 32 universities took part, including two institutions—UBC and the University of New Brunswick—that surveyed multiple campuses. Surveys were sent to a random sample of approximately 1,000 first-year undergrads at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 first-years surveyed the entire cohort. More than 12,700 students responded.
Two CUSC student satisfaction questions are featured here. For the results of seven other CUSC satisfac¬tion questions, read the web-exclusive charts.
READING THE CHARTS
The charts published here list 41 universities, including affiliates, that participated in recent NSSE surveys, as well as 31 university campuses surveyed for the 2007 CUSC. In each chart, universities are listed in descending order. When displaying the NSSE benchmark charts, universities are listed according to the benchmark scores associated with their senior-year students; for student satisfaction questions, order was determined by the percentage of survey participants who chose the highest level of satis¬faction when responding, for example, “excellent.”
The NSSE and CUSC surveys include more than 150 questions; we have published those—the five key NSSE benchmarks, plus two satisfaction questions each from NSSE and CUSC—that are the most broad and summative of student experience. NSSE charts include universities taking part in the 2006 or 2007 survey—or both, as well as one institution (Regina) that last conducted the survey in 2005. In each case, we display results from the most recent survey year. No data from first-year students are displayed for Royal Roads University as this institution does not offer first-year courses. Data displayed for the University of Western Ontario do not include results from the three Western affiliates, each of which conducted its own survey.
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