ASUNM President Kevin Stevenson is on a mission.
He wants to make sure student surveys for the Princeton Review give the University credit for its academic programs.
UNM has been included in the Princeton Review's publication The Best 357 Colleges since 1991. Every three years, researchers do surveys to update the book's student comment section.
Stevenson said the piece in the book's last publication made UNM seem like a party school.
He also said the book gave UNM a 66 out of 100 rating for academics in the last edition.
Stevenson called that unnerving.
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"The quality of education is better than that," he said. "It doesn't do the school credit."
For this reason, he tried to get as accurate a representation of the campus as possible.
Stevenson said surveys were collected through Associated Students of UNM tabling, student organizations, resident advisers and ASUNM senators. They also handed out postcards with a Web link to get students to fill out an online survey.
About 200 paper surveys collected by ASUNM were sent to the Princeton Review on Thursday.
Student Survey Manager Michael Palumbo said the Princeton Review wants about 300 surveys, but that is an average number. They are looking to get as many surveys as possible.
He said the book is devoted to undergraduate institutions.
The editorial staff, with the help of educational consultants, decides which schools will be included.
Palumbo said it is not a ranking of schools.
Every school gets two pages, filled with institutional information and opinion data that is updated every year.
Every three years, the review surveys a large amount of students from each school.
"The goal is to get a representative sample of students," he said.
Palumbo said schools chose to cooperate with the Princeton Review.
If the school distributes the survey, surveyors need to make sure it's random. The Princeton Review asks that the paper survey be done in an area where there is an equal chance of undergraduates passing by the area to make sure they have an equal opportunity to fill out the survey.
Debbie Morris, director of the Student Activities Office, said they tried to be as random as possible.
The office was first contacted to get the surveys distributed to students.
She passed the task off to Stevenson and ASUNM, because she said she likes students to do it.
A narrative is written based on student comments from surveys.
Palumbo said any student is welcome to complete the survey, and their comments will be factored into the opinion.
Online surveys are due Feb. 1. They can be found at
http://survey.review.com.
