Faculty discussions spark some rigorous debates about the validity and reliability of the NSSE... But in the main, we value the information, attend to it, and move to create ways to shore up the soft areas exposed by the reports.
Daryl H. Stevenson, Dean of Academic Administration, Houghton College
Adjustment for Part-Time Students on Four Items Comprising the NSSE 2007 Level of Academic Challenge Benchmark
Independent sample t-tests of mean differences (equal variances not assumed) indicate that full-time student respondents score higher than part-time student (less than full-time) respondents on four items contributing to the Level of Academic Challenge benchmark:
These advantages accruing to full-time respondents apply to both first-year students and seniors. (Interestingly, full-time students do not report that they write more papers/reports of 20 pages or more.)
Overall, part-time students do not constitute large percentages of undergraduate enrollments at NSSE 2007 institutions. However, there is a small number of institutions with a much higher percentage of part-time students. For example, part-time students comprise greater than 40% of students at 49 institutions and more than 50% of students at 23 institutions. Given the t-test results, institutions with more part-time students will tend to score lower on the four items and thus have a lower Level of Academic Challenge benchmark score. To compensate, NSSE adjusts the responses of part-time students at each school to resemble those of full-time students on each of these items.
To compute part-time adjustments, we first calculate the overall mean of students attending NSSE 2007 institutions by class and enrollment status for each of the four items. For each item, and separately by class, we then divide the NSSE 2007 full-time student mean by the NSSE 2007 part-time student mean to create an overall ratio. The item responses of part-time students at every institution are then multiplied by this ratio. If, for a particular student, the resulting product is greater than the maximum possible score on that item, the student's score is capped at the maximum.