The NSS – a pet hate
I have been so wrapped up in Clearing and preparing for the new academic year that I missed a recent Guardian article about the National Student Satisfaction Survey (NSS) completely until it appeared in my Facebook timeline. The article claims that the Survey should be abolished before it does any more harm. I couldn’t agree more.
The NSS is one of my pet hates (I have many), one of those utterly stupid games we feel we must play in HE. The articles captures its uselessness for actually telling us anything well. I won’t add to that here but I do want to reflect on how the NSS and all that comes with it plays out for me. The NSS is a game, unfortunately it is a game with high stakes with the results heavily influencing university rankings and rankings heavily influencing student recruitment and with student recruitment heavily influencing the institution’s bottom line… You get the drift. Just leaving students to complete the survey, or not, as they wish is thus a risky strategy. Students must be encouraged to complete it, cajoled or bribed into completing it or, dare I say it, forced into completing it. We didn’t force anyone to complete the survey here – at least not that I am aware of but the university offered prizes/discounts etc when certain completion rate thresholds were reached.
Of course completion is not enough – we need positive scores. The survey is a ranking tool, not a tool through which universities genuinely seek feedback from students. So how do you ensure your students give you the ‘right’ score? Well I would argue you don’t. You let them get on with it and if they mark you down you should have a think about it – they may have a point, they may not! But that’s not how it works in HE anymore. We are constantly asked to think about student satisfaction. What can we do to enhance it, what can we do to make sure we get high scores in the NSS? These are entirely the wrong questions to ask in education. Education is not about being satisfied. Higher education is about learning to cope with uncertainty, about being pushed out of your comfort zone and to your intellectual limits, it’s about confronting your own prejudices and ideals, it’s about thinking deeply and critically about everything you thought you knew. That is a lot of things but it probably isn’t ‘satisfaction’ – particularly if you find it difficult.
I am all for seeking and listening to student feedback and students’ views. I am open to having some really challenging debates with students about what they want from their higher education. I will challenge their views and expect them to challenge mine but I don’t pay much attention to the NSS. It doesn’t tell me anything about how to make our programmes better or how to engage students. It doesn’t tell me how to be a better teacher or how to help students learn. The higher the scores go and the less variation there is, the more depressed I get. There are so many things wrong with higher education at the moment, programmes and universities vary so much, it is absurd to think that the scores across the sector could genuinely vary so little. So the results tell me this: – we are teaching our students to tick boxes in a stupid game that tells us nothing. That’s not why I’m an academic, don’t know about you.
Post-Graduation Lull – it’s important
The Faculty of Management and Law graduations took place last week. I like graduations. There is something really quite special about watching your students walk across that stage, shaking hands with the (in this case) Vice Chancellor and collecting their certificates. It’s the end of a journey we have been privileged to be part of and the start of a much bigger journey for them. You can feel the sense of excitement, the sense of a future to come.
This year, like every year, I feel a little lost after graduation. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do – I am weeks behind with my own work, my inbox is out of control and there is next academic year to get prepared for. I miss those students leaving us, I sort of miss the last academic year and I can’t quite bring myself to really focus on the new academic year. I’m inbetween. I suspect this time of year used to be real academic downtime and that downtime is being eroded. You can now find academics on campus between the end of June and end of September and mostly they are quite harassed academics. The academic hamster wheel seems relentless. We finish teaching, we finish marking, we finish exam boards, we finish revision sessions, we finish re-sit marking, we finish re-sit exam board and suddenly it is August and we’re into clearing, then induction, then teaching… repeat…
But that downtime is important, really important. More important that I had really registered before. We need to be able to recharge our batteries, we need to be able to take time to reflect on the academic year just gone by and we need time to prepare ourselves mentally (as well as practically) for the new academic year. We need time to think, to read, to do nothing, to think about what the next year will bring, what we want to achieve and we need time to plan and we need time just to be.
So, my post-graduation lull comes at a time where I really don’t have time for it but then I never do. My job seems ever more relentless (if it is possible to be more relentless) so I am embracing the lull whether I have time for it or not. I’m just allowing myself to drift for a week, to just see what happens, to do the things I want to do, minimise the crappy paperwork as much as possible, reduce the hours to a more manageable level and to put the last academic year behind me and get ready to be part of a whole set of new journeys and dreams.
Being Head of School
I have been Head of the School of Law at the Unviversity of Bradford for nearly a year now. I have on and off thought about blogging about that and have started one or two drafts and then deleted them again. Now though, it seems to me, is a good opportunity to reflect on the last year. Being Head of School was never part of my Master Plan (as far as I have one). I always saw myself, and still do, as an academic, not as an academic manager. I applied for the interim post out of necessity rather than because I really wanted the job. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone external and I don’t think at the time that would have been the right thing for us.
So, what’s being Head of School like? Hm, it’s bloody hard work, that’s what it is. It is frustrating on so many levels. There’s so so much pointless admin; there’s the impossibility of herding academic cats (says the worst anti-hearding academic cat ever); there is meeting after meeting with no time between meetings to follow up on things discussed in meetings; there’s only really seeing students for the wrong reasons – for plagiarism, for behaviour issues or when they have serious problems… there’s other people not doing their jobs (or my perception of them not doing their jobs, let’s try and be fair) and then there’s people doing their jobs perfectly well but just not doing things my way (yep, control freak).
Being Head of School is also rewarding on all sorts of levels. There’s something really amazing about shaping the School, it’s programmes, its research and in a way there is also something amazing (if insanely infuriating) about having to justify, explain and fight for that vision. A visison which is so common sense to me and so alien to almost everyone else in the Faculty/Institution: That of a liberal legal education that is focused on learning, skills and personal growth not employability, labour markets and making money. A vision that has thinking about social justice on all sorts of levels, well actually that has thinking – full stop – at its heart. It’s a battle, every day is a battle to try and keep true to some key principles – people and their academic freedom are the most critical thing in a Law School. Freedom to shapre their careers, do their learning and research, interact with each other and learn from each other (I mean both students and staff here) – freedom to not be constrained by corporate PowerPoint slides and uniform VLEs, freedom to think and challenge and freedom to be wrong. This might sound great but then the realitiy of day to day and disengaged students and overworked colleagues hits and dumbing down, not questioning templates and processes etc is just easier. Not fighting every singly idiocy (and there are many) is easier. Not forcing your students to think is easier. Add that a lot of this goes against current university policy – Corporate PowerPoints are a must – and you can perhaps understand that I have very mixed feelings about the last year and the future.
If I am going to be Head of School for any longer (shortlisting for the post takes place Monday) I need to think really carefully about which principles are red lines and I need to think really carefully about how I can protect colleagues and students from the far too prevalent neo-liberal crap we are spoonfed daily and I need to think really carefully about how I look after myself. Because this is personal, this is about everything I believe in as an academic and a law teacher and as such, I can’t just leave it on my desk on a Friday to come back to on Monday; I can’t just stop thinking about it so I have to find a way to deal with all the crap that I will inevitably take home with me… I don’t know whether I want the job for any longer but I do feel like it’s a job I have to keep doing for a Law School I passionately believe in, for students who are for the most part amazing and for colleagues, academic and administrative, who are an inspiration every day
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