City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME VI
of California. The service provides colleges with regular updates that include legal opinions, questions
from other subscribing colleges, and new and revised policies and procedure samples reflecting new laws
and regulations. Examples of recent updates include a revision to policy concerning a district’s political
activity, and the creation of new policies regarding intellectual property and the provision of voter registration
materials. The question that remains, however, is what process will be established to formally
reflect the updates in CCSF policy manuals, inform affected departments, and implement changes.
Inclusion of All College Constituencies
Assessment of Student Satisfaction. The College continually seeks the opinions of students and employees
and researches issues concerning the quality of our programs, services, and facilities. Research is a
priority at CCSF, and the College’s Office of Research, Planning and Grants handles the demands with
a high level of professionalism. Its expertise in research design, sampling methods, data analysis, and
reporting enables the College to: (1) conduct comprehensive evaluations on a huge scale, such as student
success or student attitude studies with years of aggregated data or (2) conduct rather defined validity studies
investigating, for example, the relationship between two specific variables, such as student success in
a course, given a particular teaching method. The College has become information-rich not only because
of the tremendous output of the Office of Research, Planning and Grants, but also because of the volume
and variety of data that the College collects, generates, and maintains access to. The 1999 study, “What
Students Think of CCSF,” was an analysis of the results of three years of student satisfaction surveys
administered to 16,811 students by individual instructional departments as part of their Program Review
processes. Students were asked to rate elements of an instructional department, such as quality of instruction,
availability of instructors, respect for students, encouragement to express viewpoints, and classroom
facilities. A broad analysis of all student responses showed that students were “generally quite positive
about CCSF.” A further analysis of responses broken out by student background variables (e.g., age, ethnicity,
sex, educational goal) and institutional variables, which included school affiliation (e.g., Behavioral
Sciences) and student grade outcomes revealed more nuanced information regarding student attitudes.
For example, greater differences in student satisfaction were found among programs within each school
than among the seven schools themselves; rates of satisfaction differed by ethnicity; younger students
were more critical in their appraisal of programs and of encouragement to express viewpoints; students
who self-reported A/B grades gave high ratings regarding instructors’ encouragement to complete educational
goals and to express viewpoints, while students who self-reported D/F grades were more likely to
say that instructors did not keep them informed of their progress and complained of a general lack of
communication with instructors. Such candid results have stimulated discussion among faculty about
the important link between student participation and success, and efforts that might be made to reach
out to low-achieving students. Equally informative have been other regular student surveys such as
Students Who Petitioned for Graduation (2000 and 2001), Students Leaving Before Census (2000), and
Student Opinion Survey (2004), which, in addition to eliciting satisfaction ratings of services and instruction,
also attempted to assess students’ relationship to the College. For example, continuing students
in the 2004 study were asked to rate their “sense of belonging at the campus,” the extent to which
“students show respect for one another,” and the extent to which “faculty are supportive of students.”
As in previous studies, students responded positively in general, with older students indicating higher
levels of satisfaction than younger students, and Asian students indicating slightly lower levels of satisfaction
than other ethnicities. The 2000-01 Survey of Students Who Petitioned for Graduation and the 2004
Student Opinion Survey cited employment and personal issues as the major problems that have “affected
studies while at CCSF.” While the College may not be able to explore remedies to those problems, it can
address other issues that students raised in the “open-ended” section of the latter survey, including issues
such as limited course availability, parking, and access to student services.
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