Freshmen value patriotism

Patriotism was reported as an important value by 43 percent of more than 3,000 freshmen in a survey given in June.

Some of the survey’s results showed that, in general, the freshman respondents came from middle-class families, and more than one-half of this year’s respondents reported average high school grades of A- or better.

More than one-third of the students said that they hold a moderate political preference.

Questions on the survey addressed demographics, attitudes, beliefs, high school experiences and values.

"We want these questions to be somewhat of a general nature," said Alfred Menard, assistant vice president of university planning and analysis. "We give the university community the option to change the questions."

Menard said that this survey is distributed so that JMU will have increased knowledge about the freshman community. The survey has been distributed for the past 25 years to each incoming freshman class and 3,129 usable surveys were obtained this year.

The survey was administered to the freshmen online as part of the orientation process, and is not intended for any national publishing reasons.

"It gives you a way to figure out what the population of JMU is made up of," freshman Amanda Raus said.