Back to basics for student satisfaction: improving learning rather than constructing fatuous rankings

Abstract

There is growing concern expressed in this journal and elsewhere about the misdirection of student feedback processes. ‘Feedback’ in this sense refers to the expressed opinions of students about the service they receive as students. This may include perceptions about the learning and teaching, course organisation, learning support and environment. The problem is that feedback seems increasingly to have become a ritualistic process that results in very little if any action and, is thereby, decried as of little value. Student indifference because of the formulaic nature of the feedback and the failure to see any changes enacted only serves to reinforce the pointlessness of the process. The problem, though, is not the indifference or contempt with the process. That is the symptom. The problem is the lack of desire to use student views to make changes compounded by the obsession with standardisation of questions in fatuous national surveys. Standardising student feedback is the enemy of improvement. It misses the whole point. It facilitates ludicrous and entirely pointless rankings. Student feedback is a serious matter that provides the basis for a fundamental exploration of what works and what doesn’t work for students. It is not about creating league tables or rating teachers. Student feedback is fundamentally about making changes to the student experience at a level that improves the experience for students: teaching and learning at a programme level, general facilities at a university level. It is time to return to using student feedback as an improvement tool. Complacent and relatively meaningless one-size-fits-all surveys used to rank entire institutions are misleading, especially to prospective students, for whose benefit the obsession with league tables is supposedly aimed. Zineldin et al. (2011), for example, showed that in their study that the ten critical components of student satisfaction, in order of importance, were as follows: (1) cleanliness of classrooms (2) cleanliness of toilets (3) the skill of the professors attending the class (4) politeness of professors (5) physical appearance of professors and assistants (6) responsiveness of the professors to students’ needs and questions (7) cleanliness of the food court (8) physical appearance of classrooms (9) politeness of assistants (10) the sense of physical security the students felt on the university campus. Not many of these criteria are likely to have prominence in national surveys that have not engaged with student views before the questionnaire is constructed. While this list may be ‘idiosyncratic’ of the specific study, it is indicative of the variability of student perspectives and their considerable variance from the bland and generic statements that are found in national surveys.