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’. One should hope so. But what if months of hard toil on a dissertation are not producing first-class results, despite a tutor’s best efforts? Will every disappointed student agree that the outcome was ‘fair’, and that they received ‘helpful comments’ on their work? How many students predicted a 2.2 (let alone that rarissima avis, a third) ‘strongly agree’ that ‘my course has challenged me to achieve my best work’? In reality, 100 per cent satisfaction is improbable and undesirable for any course doing its job properly.
And yet, the NSS is now a formalised feature of university life: it is commissioned and crunched by the sector’s regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). The survey’s questions then in part determine the OfS’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) awards.
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