National Student Survey - Criticism and Support

Criticism and Support

According to the National Union of Students, the results have made institutions and colleges take student feedback more seriously, encouraging them to make changes to the areas such as gaining good quality feedback on work, better access to personal tutors, improved assessment practices and increased investment in resources, equipment and teaching spaces.

The survey was opposed in its early years by the student unions at Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick. As those universities failed to achieve the necessary 50% response rate threshold, they were excluded from early survey results.

The most publicised boycott was that of the Cambridge University Students' Union (CUSU), who described it as a “waste of government money”, and “irrelevant to the Cambridge experience” and staged a burning of T shirts and posters. CUSU also objected to the repeated attempts made by Ipsos MORI to contact students.

A number of bodies, including the Commons Education & Skills Select Committee and the National Union of Students responded to boycotts by accusing those students' unions of "elitism" and of encouraging exclusivity.

The University of Warwick Students' Union has now given its support to the survey, as has Oxford University Students' Union, saying that OUSU "believes the National Student Survey is useful for highlighting broad issues of potential concern in the University" and is "a valuable tool when it comes to campaigning on student issues." This has left CUSU as the only student union actively opposing the survey.

Since 2008, all HEIs, including Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick, have achieved more than 50% response rate so are included in national results.

Lee Harvey, former director of research and evaluation of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), criticised the NSS in letters published in Times Higher Education, calling it a "hopelessly inadequate improvement tool." Apparently because of the March 2008 letter, he was suspended from his post at the HEA, and subsequently resigned.

There have been allegations of some universities (such as Kingston University) advising students to artificially inflate the scores they give in the survey in the interest of improving the university's status in rankings derived from it. One lecturer told his students to give Kingston good scores because "if Kingston comes bottom ... no one is going to want to employ you because they'll think your degree is shit". Following an investigation of the allegations, the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) ordered that Kingston University's Department of Psychology be removed from the 2008-09 League Tables.