UR Physics and Astronomy Ranked 2nd Nationwide in Overall Graduate Student Satisfaction

October 22, 2001

A nationwide survey of graduate students ranks the Department of Physics and Astronomy 2nd place in overall graduate student satisfaction. A summary of University of Rochester Department of Physics and Astronomy rankings, in all the categories that were studied, is as follows:

Raking Criteria:

Overall Satisfaction2nd place
Information for Prospective Graduate Students1st place 
Preparation for a Broad Range of Careers2nd place 
Teaching and TA preparation4th place
Professional Development3rd Place
Career Guidance and Placement Services1st Place 
Controlling Time to Degree8th Place 
Mentoring3rd place 
Program Climate2nd Place 

Additional details about the survey are discussed in a message from the survey organizers, attached at the end of this news item.

For the rankings in various categories for US Physics Departments in general, see: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/yigal/DeptNews/Gradranking/gradrank.html

(broken copyrighted material)

Email message about the Survey:

Delivered-To: bodek@pas.rochester.edu
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 17:12:08 GMT
From: survey@nagps.org
To: bodek@pas.rochester.edu
Subject: National Doctoral Survey results

Dear Colleague,

We are pleased to announce that the results of the 2000 National
Doctoral Program Survey are now available online at
http://survey.nagps.org/ Thanks to the support of over 200
graduate institutions, doctoral programs, graduate student
associations, and professional societies, the survey was a
tremendous success -- altogether over 32,000 doctoral students
and recent Ph.D.'s assessed their program's educational practices.

The survey, funded by a grant to NAGPS from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, was designed to assess student perceptions of the
educational effectiveness of their doctoral programs based on
the adoption of widely accepted best practices in doctoral
education, as recommended by the Association of American
Universities, National Research Council, and others.

Results are available at the level of individual doctoral
programs, allowing program chairs, graduate deans, and student
leaders to use the responses to inform local discussions of
graduate education. Results for U.S. programs from which we
received 10 or more responses are publicly available on the Web.
Results for programs from which we received between 5 and 9
responses are available with a password to survey participants
from the program, the program's chair, and administrators within
the institution.You may access your program's internal report by visiting
http://survey.nagps.org/private/. Use the following email address
and password to log in:

Email address: ******
Password: ******

In addition to the results, there is a discussion forum set up for
each program. We hope that these forums will help encourage
further discussion on each program's educational practices. We
invite you to review the results for your program and to share your
thoughts on the discussion boards. When posting your comments, we
invite you to share your thoughts on the successful and effective
practices that your program has implemented.

The survey web site also provides discipline-level results as well
as the opportunity to rank doctoral programs within a field based
upon their implementations of recommended educational practices.

On behalf of the National Association of Graduate-Professional
Students (NAGPS), we would like to thank you for your interest in
and support of the survey. We are extremely grateful for your help
and hope you will find the results a valuable tool in your efforts
to offer high quality educational experiences for all doctoral
students.


Sincerely,

The NAGPS Survey Team
National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS)
survey@nagps.org