SESAME - September 2000
VC’s Column
Watching Big Brother Watch You
Last month, following a complaint from ‘disgruntled of Oxford’, the advertising standards people chastised the OU. Our offence was to state in some advertisements that the OU was in the top 15% of UK universities for quality. Usually an asterisk linked the statement to the league table that is published annually by The Daily Telegraph. The 2000 edition of the table has just appeared and puts the OU in 10th place out of 99 UK universities. Ahead of us are: Cambridge, Imperial, Oxford, York, LSE, Nottingham, School of African and Oriental Studies, UC London, and Durham.
Newspapers publish a variety of league tables, ranking universities on a host of variables ranging from the number of square feet of library space per student to the proportion of graduates who get jobs within six months of receiving their degrees. Many such tables don’t rank the OU because we don’t fit the criterion used. For instance, OU students don’t use OU library space (except, increasingly, the cyberspace of Open Libr@ry) and getting jobs after graduation is not an issue for the 75% of OU students already employed.
I like The Daily Telegraph’s league table because it is based on externally generated data about all universities. Those data come from the Teaching Quality Assessments carried out by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. An assessment team visits each university that teaches a particular subject, say General Engineering. The team spends a number of days reviewing the university’s teaching in that area and writes a very constructive report drawing attention to strengths and weaknesses. To focus its assessment the team attributes up to four points for quality on each of six dimensions: Curriculum Design, Content and Organisation; Teaching Learning and Assessment; Student Progression and Achievement; Student Support and Guidance; Learning Resources; and Quality Assurance and Enhancement.
This means that a university can score a maximum of 4x6=24 points for each subject. I’m pleased to say that the OU did score the maximum of 24 in General Engineering (the only university to do so) and also in Sociology. The Daily Telegraph considers that a score of 22/24 or above means the teaching of that subject is excellent. It constructs a league table by calculating, for each university, the proportion of the subjects assessed that achieved an excellent score. For the OU that figure is 11/17 or 65% and that puts us in tenth place. I’m proud to be in the Top Ten.
It seems odd that we should be discouraged from publicising these figures. The data supporting them has been obtained at huge public expense. It is claimed that the external quality assessment machinery for higher education costs £250m a year. Since widening access is high on the government agenda I note that this sum would pay for another one and a half OUs! In the 1990’s the quality assessment system stimulated many improvements. I fear it is now becoming a conformity assessment system.