As a student I think these are terrible ideas. The NUS is such a pathetic body, and as such I have never become a member and deny that they in any way represent my views. Students have no idea what's good for them, most of them are good for nothing and lazy expecting an easy ride from life at university. That the lecturers and academics might have this odd idea independent learning can be real meaningful learning is an anathema to most of the braindead that walk the halls of universities around the land. Students need to understand when you voluntary attend education it is up to you to make the most of it, not to be spoon-fed; as such, it seems to me, the most they can complain about - and should - is a lack of library services.

nb. I should add, I mean that last point decidedly ironically, most students would be surprised at the notion they should have to read - gosh! - entire books from libraries...

Well hell, if school kids get to interview teachers then lets join the fruitcakes and hand the asylum over to student.

I was a Student Representative for my course programme and school and it was an interesting and somewhat useful role, but the above proposal does seem completely daft.

I just want a good education for a reasonable price. And the raising of student fees alongside of the cutting of university budgets is appalling.

Exactly how much money is being wasted on this proposal that could be spent on teaching?

Or Geoffrey, you can keep money out of education. Scotland for example, has the brevity to realise that not charging for tuition fees is worth it in the long term. Power of the market indeed!

But the marketplace will never turn students into customers, for such they can never be. In industry, the job of the manufacturer is to satisfy the customer. In education, the job of the institution is not to satisfy the client, but to change him or her. Its ability to do this is dependent not on contact hours but on the gift that its staff have to inspire and to challenge.

One of the best analogies I have seen for the student-university relationship was btl on CIF actually. The student was described as the temporary employee of the university and their essays/exams were their workplace assessments. If universities are supposed to take students and turn them into people who can function and prosper in the workplace, then the customer model is not a good one.

If the function of the university is also (or even primarily!) to develop the student's intellectual personality and provide an experience of education (as opposed to spoon-feeding), then the customer model treats both the teachers and the students with ncontempt. It implies that their relationship is nothing more (and worth nothing more) than the relationship between the cashier and the customer. That devaluation of the student-teacher relationship is one I utterly resent.

Speaking as a university lecturer this article is ill-informed and incoherent

In the first place it keeps confusing schools and universities. Concluding that

a child of secondary-school age has the maturity to evaluate this gift, this strikes me as fantastic and grotesque. In confronting it, therefore, the NASUWT has my full support.

When the article is an argument about student evluation in Higher Education and for free-market competition between universities

To begin with there are already many ways in which students evaluate and affect the delivery of modules including evaluation questionnaires, mandatory and officially minuted staff/student committee meetings, the national student survey, staff module and programme reports, etc

According to Alderman

This document will have to contain undertakings covering such matters as minimum teaching-contact hours, maximum class sizes, and the timeliness and content of feedback to students on their academic performance, as well as standards of residential accommodation.

I welcome these undertakings - especially on class sizes that have crept ever upwards over the years to the detriment of teaching

The idea that things will be improved by going down the US free-market road is laughable I'll leave it to others to comment on this fallacy

I tend to think that students have a valid point of view at university level. They have chosen to be there, they are paying, so their expectations should be considered.

Schools are another matter entirely. Apart from the obvious issue of maturity and judgement it is also the case that schools are not there to provide what children want but what a wider society thinks they need. Student Voice is fundamentally missing the point in this respect.

It is not the student evaluation questionnaire that will raise standards ? the evidence from the US is that such evaluations tend to depress standards through the pressure they inevitably exert on teachers to award pleasing grades

So yet again the lead is taken from the US. However, the practice of evaluating modules by students is not new, this has been in place in Higher Education for many years. But not only is the pressure on to award pleasing grades to the students, the pressure is also on to have good feedback from modules.

How do students of any age determine what is a "good education?"
Is the students definition the same as the lecturers/teachers?

This document will have to contain undertakings covering such matters as minimum teaching-contact hours, maximum class sizes, and the timeliness and content of feedback to students on their academic performance, as well as standards of residential accommodation.

Janet Beer (VC Oxford Brookes) and Wes Streeting have produced a politically correct document that means zilch

Many institutions including Oxford Brookes are 'reorganising' and 'restructuring' and in some instituions lecturing staff are being made redundant. PhD students are taking on much of the teaching as they do at Oxford Brookes.

It's interesting as well, that Oxford Brookes have just had a huge recruiting campaign for Readers and Professors across the University to increase their research rating. As those in Higher Education know, Readers and Professors do not have much 'hand-on teaching' in fact they have as little to do with students as possible.

There is a lot of mileage in giving students in HE a bit more of a say in how courses are delivered. Anyone who is doing their job properly finds this to be a mere formality. Mediocre teachers and lecturers always did and always will need a kick up the rear. Those of us that have to work longer and harder to make up for their malpractice are in the main delighted.

However, the role of student as 'customer' has been stretched too far. The driver for this was the 'bums on seats' policy of successive governments.

Quality of teaching has dropped, average calibre of students has dropped. Support from universities and schools for teaching staff beyond moneymaking often couldn't be called much other than short termist.

Since we're supposed to live in a knowledge based economy, if you work in education, you might agree that it's rather worrying to watch that knowledge year on year, be watered down and draining out.

Student consultations are a double edged sword. This is not a clear cut black and white either-or debate.

Most universities provide ample opportunity for students to represent their views. Often these views are put across primarily by home students. There are increasing indications that in comparison to overseas students who actually pay way more than home students do, or even compared to EU students who tend to be by far, more hard working and more hungry, the home students are more demanding, and far less productive. Of course I am aware that this is a generalisation and there are many exceptions but across the board there are plenty of students who resent being set reading, resent doing any work at all and demand high grades just for handing in work.

In fact with the proposed cuts to HEFCE funding, many institutions are struggling to get students to actually hand in any work at all. You may think that all students are struggling with debts, course loads etc but you'd be surprised how many students dont actually bother handing in coursework or bother turning up to exams at all. They are given innumerable chances to complete their work but they never bother. In fact most of university teacher's time is now being taken up with chasing these students begging them to at least put down their name and ID number on a piece of paper and handing it in anytime during the year, not just on deadline just to protect their chances of attempting a re-sit in the summer, and not being counted as non-completion and risk getting funding cut off.

At the same time university management increasingly pressurises teachers and lecturers to take on more admin work. There is heavy teaching and admin workloads not to mention research targets to meet. As a result many departments take on part time or hourly paid staff to do teaching. In effect many of these people get paid to breathe in front of students. One department head calls it 'warm bodies in classrooms'. As long as there is a warm body in the classroom in the form of a teacher, students cannot claim that they are getting insufficient contact hours. For many of these people, the job is a paycheque, nothing more. They dont care about students or teaching standards. The result is complaints.

These should be legitimate concerns raised by students - they need to ask for better standard lecturers, more contact hours, better quality teaching material etc. In many teaching institutions, the teaching material is of appalling quality, university teaching qualifications are of poor standard, and employment of part time lecturers is a money making fiddle for many senior managers who employ their near and dear on the pay roll.

The problem is the senior management, not students or teachers.

This document will have to contain undertakings covering such matters as minimum teaching-contact hours, maximum class sizes, and the timeliness and content of feedback to students on their academic performance, as well as standards of residential accommodation.

Not so much 'rights' as a 'Customer Service Agreement'.

As for uncapped fees enabling students to vote with their feet: (1) forcing universities to compete on price (or the generosity of bursaries) has very little to do with standards of teaching; (2) doesn't address the issue of being able to transfer between institutions on academic grounds rather than shopping around for the 'best deal' like someone buying a mobile phone.

Good article.

One point that is often overlooked is how the q'aire data is actually analysed. By and large only numerical scaled data will be looked at; any kind of qualitative data is just too costly to analyse and is largely there just to placate. Do agree that market more likely to be effective than such sops thrown ot the students.

I suspect dear Geoffrey is pining for the day when all universities are privately funded enterprises like his own dear little University of Buckingham.

In the last few years I've seen that university students are more and more dictating the pedagogical structures of their courses. We recently had a bit of a showdown where a whole year essentially refused to do a part of their course. The primary argument was that they deserved to have control over the course structure because they were paying through their teeth through it.

It ended with the staff essentially backing down because the Students threatened to boycott the National Student Survey. That's the A-Bomb of student threats these days, and they know management will have to back down in the face of it.

The nub of the problem with university teaching isn't fees or student rights. It's the fact that, by and large, academics have a view of a university's purpose that differs wildly from everyone else's.

To wit, most academics think that the primary purpose of a university is research. They therefore think of themselves, by and large, as researchers rather than teachers, and in general they behave accordingly.

Meanwhile, everyone else thinks that the primary purpose of a university is to teach students. So naturally there's an outcry when they discover that they, or their children, are spending a very little of their time at university being actively taught. "I only have three hours of lectures a week -- what the hell are those lazy academics doing the rest of the time?" is a common sentiment, and under the circumstances, it's rather understandable.

The unfortunate thing is that neither group is wrong about a university's purpose -- a good university should do both research and teaching. But while the mismatch in expectations remains, there will always be discord.

Hells teeth, whatever next.... the electorate having a say over government?

Oxford Brookes... known as the fools on the hill in my day.

That aside, you can't (easily) move institutions mid-course so students are essentially a captive payer rather than a market.

That said, I agree with the idea that students should be seen as temporary staff.

Having experienced 3 courses (one great, one indifferent, one poor - in inverse proportion to what I paid to go there) I'd suggest more student involvement in quality assessment is a good thing but with the proviso that 'they made me read a book at home' and similar complaints are ignored.

@aardvarkif

most academics think that the primary purpose of a university is research. They therefore think of themselves, by and large, as researchers rather than teachers, and in general they behave accordingly.

Pompous holy-than-thou t****** ?

Meanwhile, everyone else thinks that the primary purpose of a university is to teach students

University management have helped widen the divide between teachers and researchers.
Even if an academic publishes, if the article is not published in a 5* journal it is seen as worthless.

it used to be the case that research underpinned teaching. Now it is a case of bringing in the money from a few sources which all universities compete for.
The research funding only works if staff are in big groups with similar research orientated staff who are then given time away from teaching to undertake the research which in turn results in publications and further research funding. If someone does not belong to that elite group of researchers they are perceived by the University as second rate and pick up the teaching (along with the research students) and the admin.

As someone who works in a university system where student evaluation is part of the law (Sweden), I have a few reservations ?

The basic problem with student evaluation is that it benefits the *next* batch of students, not the one which is actually doing the course this term, so this term's group aren't particularly interested in participating.

Then you have the problem of what to ask them. Whenever the central bureaucrats get involved in the construction of the evaluations, they want to start asking impertinent questions about what the students thought of the university's logo and what their sexual and drinking habits are! There's a strong 'gigo' (garbage in, garbage out) element too: the bureaucrats want the data to be 'reliable' and there's usually an inverse relationship between reliability and 'validity' (in the specialist sense of the words).

Then there's the question of what you do with the data you gather. There's so much of it, and if it's useful at all, it can't be easily classified. So it gets ignored.

Student representation on governing bodies, committees, etc, is a different question. This is also part of the law here - and it's very difficult to get any students to give up their free time to sit on these bodies, so you end up getting the nerds and fanatics sitting there, who aren't particularly representative of their constituencies.

Still, it keeps the bureaucrats busy (so they can't find yet more ways of interfering with our work).

As a student, I think these student consultations I agree that they are a gimmick. They are also harmful, because people like me who maybe vocal on Guardian comment's pages, tend to keep there head down at other times.

It will allow the most vocal, and - as we've seen - often the most irrational and ignorant the strongest voice.

It will also include a very small minority of people who will given clout to decide the futures of a majority.

Re teaching research would add that admin is the third category and in order of importance the ranking goes research admin teaching. I marked more exam scripts than any other member of staff for the ten years or so that I lectured (and had research contracts too) but was kept on a succession of short term contracts cos I did not do the cliquey thing and valued teaching as an equally importanrt role.

Many staff get promotion thru the admin route. Same as bankers getting rich, they handle money so lots of it sticks to their hands.

Mostly it is a scam with which the majority of academics are happy enough to comply. Traison des clercs.

To wit, most academics think that the primary purpose of a university is research. They therefore think of themselves, by and large, as researchers rather than teachers, and in general they behave accordingly.

The reward system for Lecturers and academics is based around research, why would any rational employee care about teaching when they are being told via promotion that it's not important?

@ aardvarklf - you are absolutely right - there is a big disconnect between what the actual job of a lecturer is and what the most people perceive as a lecturer's job. A lecturer should spend 40% of their time on research, 40% on teaching and 20% on admin (in general). Perhaps the name Lecturer is misleading, other countries (and some universities in the UK) use the term Assistant Prof, Associate Prof and full Prof. At least, their is more transparency in the job title, than lecturer.
The other systemic problem is that lecturers mainly get promoted on research productivity or faculty-level admin work. Teaching ability holds little to no value. Essentially, the problems that students have with university are built into the system.
Finally, there is a big disconnect between the perceived purpose of universities and the purpose of universities as understood by people who work in them. That is successive governments tell us that a university education means a better job, or better trained employees, or better business opportunities. This compares to the notion that universities are for supporting and expanding the intellectual development of our young people, and for expanding our knowledge and understanding about what constitues the world (whether that be the world of bacteria or the world of human interaction). There is a fundamental clash of expectation here and students are caught in the middle.

I went to a good UK university and some of the teaching was dreadful. Because I happen to have been born early enough to have avoided tuition fees, I never thought of myself as a customer. That's bad.

I also studied in the US at a school where the tuition fees were sky high. And I mean sky high. They had quite a rudimentary system of teaching evaluation in place that was directly related to the way in which academic appointments were made. Student evaluations played a role in assessing whether or on what terms somebody would be given tenure. As a consequence, teachers had a vested interest in designing good courses and becoming better at teaching. Universities, like all employers, shouldn't be giving people lucrative jobs for life without some kind of accountability or performance evaluation.

The reality is probably that only the students who are engaged with their courses will engage with evaluating them. Even if the engaged students constitute a minority of people on university courses, and that might be true, it's hard to see how the idea could do any harm.

It takes a few minutes to fill out a form. The form will probably be a multiple choice form with a section for comments, badly photocopied and completed anonymously. Completing such forms is far from onerous. You never know, somebody might contribute a good idea that ends up getting used.

A few observations:
in a free market, no-one votes with their feet, they vote with their wallets.
2: a free market will require universitites to say things like "we guarantee x class size" as part of their marketing so it will increase this kind of accounting work
3: Calling this a 'gimmick' is cheap and simplistic. You are confusing your knee-jerk disapproval with argument and explanation. I don't think this is necessarily the best way to raise standards at the 'top' but it is a way of 'bringing up the bottom'. In the 'old days' (my day) for instance, doing a PhD was luck of the draw whether you got a decent supervisor or not. Universities now have frameworks like this for PhD students which makes a lot of work for the good supervisors but gives the students some kind of recourse when the supervisors disappear for a year leaving a student adrift for a substantial period.
4. Students who are paying a fortune expect to know what to expect. I don't see how we can do that without these kinds of frameworks.

Do I agree with ever-increasing rules? No, not really. But any argument about them has to address the issues which this 'gimmick' is trying to address, and it's a bit more complicated (and coherent) than "blah blah in my day everything was better" which seems to underlie this article and most of the comments. If the detractors can't come up with a measured response, why should anyone listen to them?

Finally, anyone who objects to PhD students doing some teaching (always, in my experience, with supervision by a more senior colleague) should also be campaigning against junior doctors doing any doctoring, or interns doing any work anywhere or letting their children choose what they have for dinner. A PhD student well into their degree is typically extremely meticulous, up-to-date with the subject (sometimes more than the overworked supervisor whose attention is spread across far too many things) and has an appropriately circumscribed area of responsibility. Those digs are very cheap and unfair.

JorgeyBorgey, I just don't know what you expect and your comment is pretty exasperating to be honest. You say that you avoid giving any feedback to the people who have said they will act on it then complain that those people that do say something will be listened to. What exactly would solve this, at our end? No idea. What would solve this at your end? Er, saying something. Can't you write something on a blank sheet of paper and shove it under someone's door or something?

But if you are going to avoid telling anyone who can actually do anything, has asked you to tell them what needs fixing and said they will act on it, I don't see you are really in a position to complain about what happens. Sorry if i seem blunt, it's because I'm being blunt.

As a paying customer of any service individuals should accept a certain standard, however, "voting with your feet" will only be an option for the most wealthy and informed. The class debate rages on!

It's not a gimmick - student evaluations of lecturers can be extremely valuable, provided they're designed appropriately in order to give useful feedback. The ability for students to provide written comments is the key; too often evaluations consist simply of a series of questions with some sort of ordinal response. When I was an administrator, it was not uncommon to encounter cases where lecturer A had superior numerical ratings to lecturer B while it was clear from the student comments that lecturer B had provided a superior learning experience. The problem is that senior administrator often focus too much on numerical ratings.

If I were cynical, I'd say 'designing a better course' means, to many students, (a) having to do less work, and (b) making it easier to get A's.

Anyone in any doubt of what student evaluations are like in practice should check out the 'Rate Your Students' blog: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
which frequently has posts by academics describing the woes caused by student evaluations in the N American university system.

Open response all very well but costly to analyse. Mostly verbal stuff is just collected and forgotten. But whatever, dumbing down in the nineties means the current crop of lectirers are pretty shoddy too.

Re students designing course content etc obviousley stooopid. They are not called students for nothing.

I remeber one class who I alienated in my first lecture but had eating out of my hand by the tenth. It is called learning duh.

We get "students' evaluations" at the university where I teach. The students all get a form in which they are able to say what they enjoyed about your lessons, disliked, found boring etc. Fortunately, while they are read and noted, they don't seem to have a major impact on a lecturer's career. Nor should they.

I tend to get bad reviews when I'm doing certain courses which are inherently boring (like teaching systemic-functional linguistics at masters' level) or when doing a "crammer" type course (like covering the History of the English language in four, one-hour sessions and with a very high factual content to get through and 50-60 students in the class). On the other hand, when I'm teaching stuff like linguistic research methods, where I can get my eight or so students to practise their skills and do projects largely of their own choosing, and I have the luxury of time, I get rave reviews.

Gareth100: The University of Buckingham has topped the annual National Student Satisfaction Survey for the past four years. You might care to ask yourself why. At Buckingham, if we do not provide a high quality-of-learning experience, we will not attract good students. No students, no salaries.

Geoffrey Alderman

Geoffrey,
Really? Tells us more about the students you attract who are maybe loath to admit they wasted their money. I presume by good students, you mean that their cheques clear on time?

Gareth100: I really have no idea whether their cheques clear on time - this is not my responsibility, you understand. By "good" I mean that they do not expect to be spoonfed, they do not expect all the reading I require of them to be contained within a "reader," they are very willing to go to the library and find out things for themselves, they write challenging and lively essays which reflect a refreshing capacity for original thought. And they do work hard, believe me.

Oh, and their high standard is confirmed in the reports of external examiners.

OK?

Geoffrey Alderman

Geoffrey,
if Buckingham has topped the National Student Survey for the last four years, as people associated with Buckingham never seem to tire telling everyone, why is it that the Unistats website tells me that the Open University has an overall satisfaction rate of 94%, compared to Buckingham's 92%?

wabznazmm: Because the OU is not a campus-based, bricks-and-mortar university, is it?

I should add that in 2009 Times Higher Education placed Buckingham - again for the fourth year running - top of its "overall satisfaction" list, excluding small, specialist institutions: See
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407758&c=2

Goodnight!

Geoffrey Alderman

If you agree that the role of lecturers is to CHANGE students then student consultations are clearly not worthwhile.

Nor are student evaluations of teaching, which Alderman dissed in a previous comment.

I work at a Big 10 university in the US and I generally find student evaluations quite informative.

But the basic premise seems odd to me. CHANGE students?

I'm content if they just learn the material.

But the marketplace will never turn students into customers, for such they can never be. In industry, the job of the manufacturer is to satisfy the customer. In education, the job of the institution is not to satisfy the client, but to change him or her. Its ability to do this is dependent not on contact hours but on the gift that its staff have to inspire and to challenge.

Which is exactly where student consultation comes into it's own. Because you can't simply work out standards of teaching from a bunch of numbers. Numbers are a crude statistic at best.

I'm a student and I am a course rep for 1/2 my courses - most of the teaching is excellent and for the majority of lecturers who are more than competent at their jobs, the feedback and the meetings are but brief formalities. On the other hand, I spent the best part of an hour going through someone else's lecture course in a feedback meeting. There were other professors sitting in on the meeting and it was minuted - changes were promised. If she's just as bad in subsequent years, it will have been noted as such and could form the basis for replacing her. But hopefully that lecture block will be masses better for next year's group of students. At any rate, the student rep system has done no damage and may well have improved a bunch of things.

The statistics compiled in the charter are in themselves worthless, but the principle of trusting students to feedback intelligently and responsibly about their courses is a good one and should allow bad courses or universities to effect more improvements without students having to pack up and switch!

True, some students may in fact turn out to be their own worst enemies, and push for easier courses and lighter workloads, but given the money and the time and the effort entail, it is unbearably cynical to presume that they would make up the majority.

The numbers are vacuous, but the values are sound - there's very little risk of damage and a good change that some tangible good'll come out of this!

P.S. Agree about the kids hiring teachers thing - terrifying!

Geoffrey: you're right, the OU is not "a campus-based, bricks-and-mortar university". And what difference does that make? It employs educational methods not common in many universities, and successfully achieves the same results. As someone championing the alternative approaches adopted by Buckingham, I would have though you would have applauded the OU's innovative work.

Even if you don't feel this way, I think it would be better if, in future, you said Buckingham was the 'highest rated campus-based, bricks-and-mortar university' in the country, rather than deny the excellent work the OU does simply because the students who study with it don't happen to congregate in buildings very often.

I always tell my students that joining a university is like joining a gym. It's not enough to just turn up and pay your fees: you need to actually exercise to get fit!

Students can have very valid comments on teaching, and I have used them to change my courses over the years. On the other hand, they are not the experts on the standards they need to reach. I may have to work them harder than they like to get the results they need!

Geoffrey Alderman is totally wrong if he thinks the higher education sector will be helped by more marketisation.Why this typical rightwing claptrap that the market is an answer to all our problems? President Bush was going to leave the US economy to the markets to sort out until he was persuaded that this might lead to a wholesale collapse of the banking system.What resulted? Good old fashioned state intervention form the most powerful capitalist country on earth!

So far, the implementation of tuition fees has done nothing but harm to the HE sector.You now have a generation of students who whinge about their lack of 'service' if they don't get a 2.1 but would never (in the main) consider that they might have to actually do some work to get it. In the meantime, the NUS is concerned with pathetic campaigns such as the one mentioned about 'quality' and has not mounted a single sustained argument for the right to free higher education.