By ED SANCHES and PAUL WALKE
Forty-four percent of BYU students own personal computers, and the majority of students have access to computers, according to a survey conducted by seven Statistics 334 students.
Volunteers questioned 709 undergraduates randomly selected from five colleges: Education, Nursing, Engineering, Physical and Mathematical Sciences and Fine Arts and Communications.
According to the survey, 81 percent of those who don’t own computers have off-campus access to a computer. Over half have access to roommates’ computers.
However, only 17 percent of the students surveyed said they needed to use a computer more than five hours per week for homework.
Curiosity was a big reason for doing the study, said Del Scott, assistant academic vice president over computing services, who sponsored the survey.
“There has never been a survey done like this before and we (the university administration) have no idea how many machines are out there. We want to know the real number of computers students have so that whatever decisions we make will benefit students who have computers already and those who don’t.”
The survey found that over 70 percent of the computers owned by students are IBM compatible, and most of those are equipped with 486 megabyte capacity or less.
Only 18 percent of students own Macintosh computers and only 40 percent of those are Power Macintosh computers with the Pentium chip.
Beverly Zimmerman, English 316 course coordinator, doesn’t accept anything printed on a dot matrix printer.
“Technical writing teaches students to write professionally, and in the professional world, work needs to look good,” she said.
The pressure placed on students to do quality work can pressure students to buy their own computer. Thirty-six percent of students in the survey plan to purchase a computer within the year.
A salesman at Circuit City, when asked if the majority of computers he sold were to students, said “Absolutely.”
Darrell Dickinson, a salesman at Ultimate Electronics, said he sells around 15 computers a week to students, with that number higher at the beginning and end of semesters.
Until her sister purchased a computer, Stacy Lunn, a sophomore from Boston, Mass., had to use the on-campus computers to do all her papers.
“I hated it. It cost money and I didn’t get much help from the people there because they didn’t want to be there and neither did I. It has been a lot easier to use my sister’s computer.”
Because of the renovations in the Wilkinson Center, the library has the only remaining general computer lab. Computer labs for certain majors are free but have limited access. However, 84 percent of students feel that general computer labs suit their needs and 86 percent feel that major computer labs are adequate.
“We must be doing something right,” Scott said.
Eric Anderson, a sophomore from Visalia, Calif., uses the Internet access labs in the James E. Talmage Mathematical Sciences/Computer Building. Only those who have an account there can use them, but there are still problems.
“Unless I go early in the morning to use the lab, I always have to wait in line. That seems to be the story of my life: waiting in line for computers,” Anderson said.
Brett Goeringer, a graduate student from Orem said, “Whenever a line builds up for the IBM computers in the N. Eldon Tanner Computer Center, I simply use the Mac’s. I don’t know why students make such a big deal about using the IBMs; they’re not all that different.”
Todd Graham, a statistics major and leader of the student team who conducted the survey, feels that he is lucky to have access to the computer labs in the Statistics Department because he has seen students waiting in line for computers and printers in other labs.
The survey had a margin of error of 15 percent. Because of lack of time and resources, the survey team was unable to survey students from all 11 colleges, but Scott plans to sponsor another survey in the near future to determine the number of computers in the other colleges.
