PBA Home > Institutional Research & Analysis > Surveys > Senior Survey 2008 > Guide to Interpreting By-College and By-Major Graphs

Senior Survey, Spring 2008

Guide to Interpreting By-College and By-Major Graphs

The symbols in the graphs of the Senior Survey by-college and by-major results denote mean (average) item responses for a particular group of students. For example, in the by-college graphs, the first row labeled "Recommend UCB" illustrates mean responses, by college, for the item that asks seniors whether they would recommend CU-Boulder to a friend considering college.

The red diamond in the by-college graphs denotes the campus-wide mean for seniors in Arts and Sciences. The blue letters denote means for seniors in different CU-Boulder colleges, including Arts and Sciences divisions. A key showing the particular college, school, or division denoted by each letter appears at the bottom of each graph.

In the by-major graphs, the orange diamond denotes majors in Arts and Sciences, the blue circle denotes majors in Business, the green square denotes majors in Engineering, and the purple triangle denotes majors in "Professional/other" schools and colleges (i.e., Architecture and Planning, Education, Journalism, and Music). Letters in the graphs denote different majors, within colleges. Because of the large number of majors displayed in the graphs, separate highlighted graphs that allow efficient viewing of results for individual majors are provided. In these graphs, each major is highlighted in turn by a red triangle.

Senior Survey items have several different response formats. For example, some items have a five-point scale, whereas others have a three-point scale. Consequently, response values for all items in the graphs have been re-scaled. This allows items with different response formats to be plotted on one graph that has a horizontal axis ranging from "low" to "high." The vertical bar in the center of the graph simply indicates the midpoint of that axis.

Last revision 06/20/08