Should university students really feel ‘satisfied’? Or would we rather they felt challenged? For the honchos of higher education, the answer is clear — and alarming.
The National Student Survey (NSS), which was introduced in 2005, collects data that allows crude comparisons to be made between universities. The survey asks 300,000 final-year undergraduates to answer 27 questions about their experience of teaching, academic support, assessment and feedback. Some of these are entirely unproblematic: all universities should want students to find that ‘staff are good at explaining things’, or that feedback on work has been ‘timely’. But others are double-edged. Imagine a course where 90 per cent of students agree that ‘staff have made the subject interesting’. Not all undergraduates will find their course to be quite right for them: should a faculty strive to ‘make’ the uninvested interested, even when such efforts often short-change their more engaged peers?
Another question asks whether ‘marking and assessment has been fair’.
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