Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Kenneth H. Gillen
Austen Shakespeare
Reporter
The University of Glasgow has performed significantly better than last year in the National Student Survey (NSS), moving up from 35 in the UK for student satisfaction to 19 out of 149. The survey was released on 9 August.
A number of high-profile universities are missing from this year’s results due to a lack of students taking part in the survey. In order for a university to be eligible to be included, at least 50% of undergraduates at a university must participate. At various universities including Oxford, Cambridge, and Sheffield, students did not answer this year’s survey in protest against the Teaching Excellence Framework. The framework would allow universities that score highly on the survey and other criteria to increase their tuition fees beyond the current £9,000 per annum cap. The National Union of Students (NUS) strongly opposed this and various leaders reached out to individual union leaders to encourage students not to answer the survey.
Amatey Doku, NUS Vice President for Higher Education, stated: “The Government wanted to use today’s NSS results to allow universities which scored highly to raise fees from £9,000 to over £10,000 by 2020 as part of their draconian reforms to higher education.”
“Our membership made it clear to us that they found this unacceptable and demanded we campaign to sever any link between their crude Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and a rise in tuition fees which would hit students hard.”
The NSS reported a notable drop in responses from last year’s 312,000 survey respondents down to 304,000 this year. However, the NSS remains the largest survey of its kind. Among those who did answer the survey, 84% were happy with the quality of teaching while only 2% reported themselves as feeling severely disappointed.
