Student Questionnaire Surveys

We enlisted the cooperation of some instructors to ask students to fill out a questionnaire (either on paper or online) asking six questions about AIMA:
  1. Effectiveness in teaching AI (0=ineffective, 10=very effective):
  2. Usefulness as a reference book (0=useless, 10=very useful):
  3. Overall readability (0=unreadable, 10=very readable):
  4. Overall level of interest (0=boring, 10=fascinating):
  5. Overall level of technical difficulty (0=easy, 10=impenetrable):
  6. Your overall impression of the book:

Here are the the median scores on the questions, by school:

School Effectiveness Reference Readability Interest Difficulty Impressions When
Berkeley 8 8 8 8 5 Impressions Spr 95
Columbia 8 8 9 8 5 Impressions Spr 95
Harvard 8 - - - "right" Comments Spr 95
Oregon St. 9 8 8 8 5 Impressions Fall 95
Pittsburgh 9 8 8 8 7 Impressions Fall 95
Columbia 8 7 8 8 5 Impressions Fall 95
Michigan 7 7 7 6 6 Impressions Fall 95
Online Q. 8 8 9 8 4 Impressions Fall 95
Totals 8 8 8 8 5 Impressions 1995

For Harvard, the book got an overall 4 on a 5 point scale, which we translate as 8 of 10.

Some other schools did student questionnaires that did not ask for numerical ratings, but did provide subjective student impressions.


AIMA Home Contact Russell & Norvig