This week, Student Senate obtained the results of its 2009 student survey.

The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 18 to Oct. 20, polled Calvin students on a variety of topics relating to campus life. It is designed to help both Calvin College and Student Senate gauge campus opinion and decide which issues need immediate attention.

Many questions were geared toward determining if students were satisfied with the number and quality of Calvin-sponsored events. Generally speaking, students responded positively: just over half said that Calvin provided an appropriate number of weekend events, and over a third (36 percent) reported attending three or more Calvin-sponsored concerts per year. Fifty-six percent of students said that Calvin concerts represented their musical tastes well, compared to 44 percent who said they did not.

Another series of questions were directed at student alcohol consumption. According to Ben Shoemaker, president of Student Senate, the questions about alcohol were designed to help the Student Development to answer the question, “Why do Calvin students drink?” Currently, Student Development is investigating whether more campus-sponsored events will “create venues of entertainment other than drinking,” according to Shoemaker.

While the results did show that many Calvin students do enjoy a drink or two on the weekends — at least 452 out of the approximately 1,700 respondents said they consumed alcohol regularly on Friday evenings, statistically the most popular time for students to drink — they also showed that many Calvin students drink very little, if at all. A shade over one third of students (33.35 percent) said they had not consumed any alcohol since enrolling at Calvin, and 64 percent said they do not regularly have two drinks or more in a single sitting.

Calvin students were split on at least one controversial issue. According to the results of the survey, almost 40 percent of students oppose the recent effort to ban smoking on campus, slightly more than the 37 percent of students who said they supported it. Twenty-three percent of students had no preference.

Around 1,700 students participated in the survey. Just over 61 percent of survey respondents were female (though they make up only 54 percent of Calvin students overall), and 62 percent lived on campus — either in the dorms (47 percent) or Knollcrest East (15 percent).