The regular evaluation of ongoing activities under academic programs is required evidence towards academic development. Indeed, such evaluations generally involve data collection on a Likert type item as one (strongly disagree) to five (strongly agree). While using arithmetic mean in item by item analysis to derive inferences, as adopted by the National Commission for Assessment and Academic Accreditation (NCAAA), two issues occurred to us, its accuracy as well as usefulness. We took initiatives to also use more appropriate and useful measures to deal with the ordinal scale involved in such data. Surprisingly, a review showed a mixed practice. This article aims to describe and advocate the need of focusing more on such appropriate practices. Such practice extends many-fold benefits: (i) theoretical appropriateness, (ii) accuracy in results and related inferences, (iii) ease of understanding, (iv) useful clues regarding academic improvements, and (v) optimum use of allocated resources

We appraise comparatively and analytical data under Student Experience Survey (SES) to discuss the possible generalizability of related College level differentials in Saudi Arabia. For this, data collected from students of two academic programs namely Bachelor of Dental Surgery, College of Dentistry; and B.Sc. Nursing, College of Nursing, University of Dammam, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, were considered. These data relate to experience of students halfway of respective academic program. The percentage of participation in SES by students was 100% and 94% respectively. Students of neither the programs reported high quality perception about any of the 20 items considered under SES. With a target of satisfaction by at least 50% students, students from College of Nursing expressed better satisfaction than those from the College of Dentistry. Same is true in case of aiming to achieve satisfaction by at least 75% students. However, to gain satisfaction by at least 80% students, each of the 20 items in both colleges need focus of college as well as university administrators towards required improvements. In summary, suitable to its varying environment, each program/college in a university requires specific improvement planning

Academic institutions preparing for quality and academic accreditation adopt a range of evaluations. Each of such evaluations involves closed items, a mixture of individual items on various aspects, followed by global item which is the overall satisfaction of students about related evaluation. A common question in mind of the academic developers is “where to start, using global items results, or, individual items results!” Through exploratory results of course evaluation survey (CES) data on courses in nursing program of University of Dammam, this article attempts to answer this question. In summary, under this program which is in the developmental phase, one can expedite decision making related to required action plans by using global items results

The periodic evaluation of academic programs is mandatory for quality management in higher education world-wide. This paper reports a unique setting in which each student performed two such evaluations using structured question-naires, viz.:(a) “Student Experience Survey” (SES) for their learning experience halfway through their academic pro-gram, and (b) “Program Evaluation Survey” (PES) at end of the program. A comparative appraisal of these two sets of data from students doing the Bachelor of Dental Surgery, College of Dentistry, University of Dammam, Saudi Arabia, aims to see if it is valid to generalize the observed related differentials in Saudi Arabia. The percentage of students’ participation was 100% in both SES and PES. In the students’ perceived cumulative experience, none of the total 20 items in SES was reported to be of either “high” or “acceptable” quality. By contrast, in the PES, one of the 13 items common to both questionnaires was reported to be of “high quality (“what I have learnt in this program will be valu-able for future”)”. Again, one of nine additional items in PES (“Developed knowledge & skill for my chosen career”) emerged to be of acceptable quality. In summary, irrespective of timing for PES, the results suggest the need of im-provements in relation to almost every item confirming ongoing developmental phase

Program evaluation survey (PES) by students in higher education is one of the range of evaluations of academic programs. Others are course evaluation, teaching skills evaluation; and surveys of facilities and services. The present study employs the available PES data collected in colleges of Dentistry and Medicine, University of Dammam (UD), Saudi Arabia. Our PES relates to students’ experience at the end of their academic program. The present paper analyses these data and discusses the usefulness of global item results vis-à-vis individual item results in quality improvements of higher education. The respective percentage of participating students was 100 and 65. The PES results revealed that in view of poorly graded global items results, there is need of focus on global item results, leading to continuing improvements in all the areas covered in the questionnaire