Students’ Academic Satisfaction: The Case of CED at KFUPM

University administrations world wide are keen to know that their students are satisfied with their academic life in the university, including colleges, faculty, courses, facilities, etc. This issue is of vital importance for high standard universities, which adopt internal evaluation systems. Students input on such attributes is of great importance for both academic and fiscal planning purposes. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) is no exception. The University has its own evaluation system of courses, faculty, as well as services. However, sometimes individual colleges or programs, need more and specific information about their students satisfaction with their programs. This study is based on the results of a large scale survey that was conducted among all College of Environmental Design (CED) students. Its findings provide major insights and accurate accounts of the students academic satisfaction in a Saudi university. It also outlines the ways and approaches that students feel can make them satisfied with their colleges, or universities. The implications are obvious and can be useful to all universities world wide. Background and Literature Review The students academic satisfaction levels are the major concern to university administration as well as academic and educational planners. Therefore it has caused a number of researchers to study different aspects of the academic life and the students evaluation of it[1,2,3,4,5]. It is normally used as a way of evaluating the academic experience of university administration as well as justifying any fiscal commitments[2,3,5,6,7,8]. This particular aspect of the academic experience is vital to any improvements efforts attempted by any college academically or administratively and it is shared globally[9,10,11,12]. Many studies have been conducted to evaluate the performance of students at different levels. All of which have dealt with this issue from different perspectives. Neumann and Neumann argue that the concept of student satisfaction is composed of four factors (sex, major, school years, and academic performance). Each of these factors is best predicted by a different combination of independent variables. However academic performance is a dominant predictor of all four factors[1]. A student attitude inventory (SAI) was developed by Thompson in Britain which contains 47 items to identify students in 99 JKAU: Eng. Sci., vol. 11 no. 1, pp. 99-107 (1419 A.H. / 1999 A.D.)