The National Student Survey (NSS) is now in its tenth year. Vice-Chancellors set targets by it, newspapers and magazines use it to create league tables and university strategies are framed around it. Expressing an off-message opinion on the NSS cost former HEA research director Lee Harvey his job.
It surprises me how little has actually been written by an NSS in peer-reviewed journals. By ‘how little’ I don’t mean little as in nothing, but relatively little considering the big part it plays in the life of the British university.
I’ve long been a critic of the NSS. What it comes to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning, the NSS is a bit like using a screwdriver to put a nail into the wall. It is possible to get a nail in into the wall using a screwdriver, but you’re better off using a hammer. If you don’t have a hammer then you might go ahead and use the screwdriver at the risk of a bent nail, broken screwdriver or injured hand.
However, perhaps I’ve been a bit mean to the NSS over these past few years. For all the emphasis on ‘overall satisfaction’, and assessment and feedback you might think that there were only three or four questions on the NSS. The NSS asks questions about course organisation, library resources and skills development as well, but we don’t hear much about these. What if we actually paid attention to some of these questions?
I took up this challenge in developing a new system of measurement for the NSS. I reasoned that if we considered all the questions and understood their relative importance we could bring about a system where each UK course at each university could have a ‘score’—in my paper I call this the Weighted Student Satisfaction Score (WSSS). However a raw score of say 1400 doesn’t tell you what they means in relation to other scores, so the scores are then normalised to a normal distribution so that an average course scores 100 (the Weighted Student Satisfaction Quotient—WSSQ). Over time it will be possible to trace changes in both absolute and relative scores. The system is fully outlined in the article and takes into account subject differences as well as providing a bonus for good response rates.
The full ‘Canning list’ (a term used by David Law in his editorial is available from my website.
Here are the top 10 best courses in the whole UK according to the 'Canning list'.
|
Overall rank
|
Institution
|
Subject
|
Type
|
WSSS
|
WSSQ
|
|
1
|
Hugh Baird College
|
Fine Art
|
Other undergraduate
|
1884.7
|
141.0
|
|
2
|
Somerset College
|
Drama
|
Other undergraduate
|
1877.6
|
140.5
|
|
3
|
Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education
|
Imaginative writing
|
First degree
|
1869.7
|
140.0
|
|
4
|
Plymouth College of Art
|
Cinematics and photography
|
Other undergraduate
|
1861.6
|
139.4
|
|
5
|
Petroc
|
Design studies
|
Other undergraduate
|
1843.1
|
138.2
|
|
6
|
University of Cumbria
|
Fine art
|
First degree
|
1836.8
|
137.7
|
|
7
|
Northumbria University Newcastle
|
Architecture
|
Other undergraduate
|
1836.0
|
137.7
|
|
8
|
Imperial College London
|
Geology
|
First degree
|
1833.9
|
137.5
|
|
9
|
University of Glasgow
|
Social policy
|
Other undergraduate
|
1828.5
|
137.2
|
|
10
|
NCG
|
Marketing
|
Other undergraduate
|
1817.4
|
136.4
|
A couple of subject ranking examples
Physics and Astronomy top 10.
|
Rank
|
Institution
|
Type
|
WSSS
|
WSSQ
|
|
1
|
Lancaster University
|
First degree
|
1685.1
|
127.4
|
|
2
|
Nottingham Trent University
|
First degree
|
1663.6
|
126.0
|
|
3
|
University of Birmingham
|
First degree
|
1571.6
|
119.7
|
|
4
|
University of St Andrews
|
First degree
|
1517.9
|
116.0
|
|
5
|
Keele University
|
First degree
|
1511.7
|
115.6
|
|
6
|
University of Hull
|
First degree
|
1510.9
|
115.6
|
|
7
|
University of Bath
|
First degree
|
1494.0
|
114.4
|
|
8
|
University of Sheffield
|
First degree
|
1471.3
|
112.9
|
|
9
|
University of Sussex
|
First degree
|
1456.7
|
111.9
|
|
10
|
University of Hertfordshire
|
First degree
|
1452.7
|
111.6
|
French
|
Rank
|
Institution
|
Type
|
WSSS
|
WSSQ
|
|
1
|
Coventry University
|
First degree
|
1686.9
|
127.5
|
|
2
|
Queen's University Belfast
|
First degree
|
1667.9
|
126.2
|
|
3
|
Northumbria University Newcastle
|
First degree
|
1595.6
|
121.3
|
|
4
|
University of Southampton
|
First degree
|
1595.1
|
121.3
|
|
5
|
University of Exeter
|
First degree
|
1547.5
|
118.1
|
|
6
|
University of St Andrews
|
First degree
|
1507.7
|
115.4
|
|
7
|
Newcastle University
|
First degree
|
1501.1
|
114.9
|
|
8
|
University of Leicester
|
First degree
|
1496.1
|
114.6
|
|
9
|
Edinburgh Napier University
|
First degree
|
1486.6
|
113.9
|
|
10
|
King's College London
|
First degree
|
1482.6
|
113.6
|
Links
Article in Perspectives
Full dataset
