This year the department assessed its performance through questionnaires circulated among the departments recent graduates, exit interviews with students during their final graduation checks, and a survey of students accepted into graduate school. Departmental strengths noted by students included excellent and knowledgeable instructors, helpful secretary, excellent courses, faculty accessibility, good internships and community service activities, excellent field trips (despite breakdown of vehicle), good advising, help with graduate school, and the ability of students to plan (or individualize) significant parts of their own programs.

Departmental weaknesses included a number of complaints about classrooms (too hot or too cold, crowded rooms, uncomfortable desks, poor lighting, banging steam pipes, loud lawnmowers outside), parking problems in university parking lots, obsolete computer equipment in labs, cartography lab too small, and too few upper division courses.

Departmental responses to these concerns include the following: (1) Lab upgrades: The department is constantly striving to upgrade lab and other classroom instructional equipment, but must stay within tight budget constraints; in addition, the department has recently become a partner in a very extensive campus-wide program to upgrade GIS computing facilities; student complaints about lab facilities will in be addressed when the various upgrades are implemented. (2) More upper division courses: The department already accepts in its degree program many overlapping courses from other departments; in the future student advising will include more emphasis on the existing spatial, quantitative, cultural, and environmental courses offered in other departments that are acceptable in individual student programs of study. (3) Concerns about crowded and uncomfortable classrooms: This will be solved when a new building replaces our current facilities.

Also, during the Spring and Fall semesters nine current and former graduates were accepted into graduate degree programs. Most of these were in geography departments, but not all. They included Arizona State (Ph.D. program in geography), University of Utah (masters program in urban planning), University of Nottingham, UK (masters/doctoral program in geography), Old Dominion University (masters program, international relations), University of Colorado (law school), University of Utah (masters program in geography), Utah State (masters program in geography & resource management), University of Utah (masters program in GIS and geography), and Central Washington University (masters program in natural resource management).