Uni feedback slammed in survey

For the second year running, Warwick has received poor results for the quality of its academic feedback in the National Student Survey (NSS).

Overall student satisfaction with assessment and feedback at the University has dropped by a point since last year’s survey to just 61 percent, leaving Warwick with one of the worst scores in the Russell Group.

Several subject areas included in the survey failed to reach 50 percent student satisfaction with academic feedback, including biological sciences, medicine and dentistry, molecular biology, biophysics and biochemistry. Satisfaction with academic feedback from courses associated with electronic and electrical engineering, meanwhile, dropped by 10 percent to 48 percent overall.

The poor performance of subjects related to biology and the life sciences in particular will raise concerns.

In 2010 the Department of Biological Sciences and the Warwick Horticultural Research Institute were merged into the School of Life Sciences in a controversial move that prompted the SU to raise concerns over the continued quality of teaching in the new department. The University has dismissed claims that there is any link between the merger and the quality of feedback.

Just 42 percent of students of the biological sciences at Warwick were satisfied overall with the quality of their academic feedback. Only 36 percent said that feedback had helped them to clarify things they hadn’t understood, whilst just 33 percent said feedback had been prompt. In the biology and the related science category a paltry 18 percent said that feedback had been prompt.

Coventry University’s Biomedical Science course enjoys a 69 percent feedback satisfaction rating, according to Key Information Sets (KIS) released recently by the government. Warwick’s Biomedical Sciences course, meanwhile, achieved a score of just 16 percent.

Warwick’s 61 percent feedback satisfaction rating falls well short of Coventry’s 74 percent and the Russell Group average of 67 percent.

The statistics will make grim reading for university officials. Vice chancellor Prof. Nigel Thrift is said by several unnamed souces to be “furious” with the results of the survey, and has demanded an explanation from underperforming departments.

A statement on the University’s website pledged that it would “examine how it can build on that feedback score by examining best practice in our Departments’ assessment and assignment management and rapidly rolling out that best practice across all of our Departments.”

The results will further increase tensions between the University and the SU, who are currently negotiating this year’s Student Charter, the jointly authored annual statement of the University’s aims.

At the time this issue of the Boar went to print, the team of elected Sabbatical Officers had refused to sign the document on the grounds that its provision for feedback was too weak.

The rejected clause allows a four week turnaround period for assessed work, but allows for extensions ‘where the nature of the assessment or exceptional circumstances require that feedback cannot be made available with the four week timescale’.

In a joint statement to the _Boar_, the Sabb team called the wording “imprecise” and “unambitious”, arguing that considerations made for the nature of the assessment concerned may be used as an excuse for long delays in the return of assessed work.

“If the University was as serious as the student body in wanting to improve feedback, they wouldn’t be signing off on this wording,” the statement read.

Elsewhere in the NSS Warwick fared better. 87 percent of students said they were satisfied by ‘the teaching on my course’, 78 percent said the same of the university’s academic support , and 88 percent said they were satisfied with the learning resources available.

Overall satisfaction with the University has dropped from 88 percent to 87 percent, whilst 74 percent say they are satisfied with the Students’ Union.