How well do Canadian universities follow best practices?

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) asks first- and senior-year students dozens of specific questions about how they spend their time in and out of the classroom. NSSE is a study of best educational practices and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those practices.

The NSSE results are headlined by the Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, created by NSSE to compare performance across all universities—Canadian and American. These benchmarks focus on five key areas: level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experience, and supportive campus environment. The higher a school’s scores from student responses on the five benchmark topics, the better the chance, according to NSSE, that its undergrads are learning and getting the most out of their university experience.

The following charts show the NSSE benchmark results for 2012. We have listed the universities in descending order of achievement, according to their senior-year scores. Note: a broken bar indicates that the results for that university exceeded the scale used in our chart.

Select a chart below. On the next screen, place your cursor over the chart and click to enlarge.