Tag Archives: quality

Live from Tallinn: Does QA lead to enhancement?

Awaiting Jethro Newton's keynote
Awaiting Jethro Newton's keynote

I promised that I would blog and tweet from the European Quality Assurance Forum.

This evening we were treated to a keynote address from Jethro Newton (University of Chester) on the question, 'Does quality assurance lead to enhancement?' One of his central points is there has been very little actual research into this question.

Professor Newton also used the term 'Quality Revolution' to describe the changes in QA since the early 1990s. A member of the audience challenged him on this- it does seem to suggest something more radical than actually happened.

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Discard the irrelevant: Statistics don’t bleed, but our students do.

I have written an new article for the LLAS blog (in a personal capacity).

 

Some rise by sin and others by virtue fall. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Statistics are everywhere in education. We have the National Student Survey (NSS), the First Destinations Survey, newspaper league tables, and the Times World University rankings among others. Universities are now required to publish ‘Key Information Sets’ (KIS) from 2012. The KIS has data from the NSS (the higher the agreeing percentages the better), the cost of university accommodation (presumably the lower the better), fees (the lower the better), graduate employment rates (the higher the better), percentage of assessment which is written exams (depends on the student) and number of ‘contact’ hours (again, depends on the student). In short if it can be measured the data is out there. And if it can’t be measured, we’ll find a way to measure it anyway, (research impact anyone?). Add to all this the information that students get from visit days, Facebook, twitter, the online student forums, friends and the phrase ‘information overload’ comes to mind. In his report Dimensions of Quality Graham Gibbs warns us about that immeasurable factor, reputation, which can override any real measure of quality. I suspect that all this information only serves to make reputation all the more important.

Read the full article on the  LLAS news blog

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