Does the instrument yield valid information?
The NSSE design team that developed the instrument worked very hard to make certain the items on the survey were clearly worded, well-defined, and had high face and content validity. Logical relationships exist between the items in ways that are consistent with the results of objective measures and with other research. The responses to the survey items are approximately normally distributed and the patterns of responses to different clusters of items discriminate among students both within and across major fields and institutions.
