Student Comments/Assessment

From Fall 2004

3.55 out of 4.0: Being in a cluster helped me feel comfortable with my professors
3.43- Participating in a cluster was a good introduction to College
3.41- It was a positive educational experience for me.
3.07 – The plenary sessions exposed me to aspects of the discipline that I would not have learned otherwise.

Students in the clusters tend to have a higher GPA and their retention rate is higher.

Here are some comments by students in the Cluster Program in the last couple of semesters:

No matter what we talked about in Lit. Hist and Racism and Sexism, they all fit together.

I have become more social and outgoing and because of the Racism class, more accepting of people, even though I was before.

It allowed me to comfortably participate, study with others, and see how each topic could be related to other topics.

Personally, I feel that the cluster has helped me create close bonds with other students and my professors. The environment was very comfortable to interact and was always interesting. I felt that the integration of the 3 disciples [sic] was perfect and interesting.

I liked the trip to Ellis Island b/c it gave us a chance to explore our backgrounds and connect it to some of the courses;.

I enjoyed the trips the most as they combined a majority of the different aspects to delve in and study.

I enjoyed the first plenary and the plenary on two point discrimination. I liked the first because it introduced me to a new method of discussion in which professors and students interact on a different level.

I liked the cluster session when we discussed classification because it connected the three subjects.

My favorite was the Martha Stewart trial – fun because it was well organized and took a cohesive team to win the case.

Enjoyed 1984 – comparing the movie and the book. Rwanda.

Trip to NYC – was a chance for me to learn the history of a familiar place. Film on the Holocaust – it make you realize how bad it really was.