Emails leaked to Varsity from senior management at Anglia Ruskin University have revealed damning evidence of the University’s encouragement of efforts by staff to hike ARU’s National Student Survey results.

The NSS, which surveys over 300,000 students annually on their university experience, has been seen by ARU senior management as a way of improving their university’s public reputation in the wake of having finished bottom of the 2007 Sunday Times University League table after students slated ARU on grounds of “teaching, organisation and management”.
An email sent in the wake of the publication of the Sunday Times League Table from Vice Chancellor Mike Thorne highlights awareness that “everyone who reads the [Sunday Times League Table] was deeply shocked to find us bottom” and discusses the fact that “we need to respond to [this] pretty smartly, both internally and externally.”

This manifested itself several months later, not in the form of a drive to improve standards of “teaching, organisation and management” but in an missive advocating a push to redress the damage done to ARU’s reputation through the NSS. A 31 January circular from Dr Paul McHugh, Director of Student Affairs, explained that although “it is important that we do not attempt to influence students [responding to the NSS] unduly... I do think it’s reasonable to point out... that NSS results are increasingly seen as a key component of a University’s external reputation and that reputation will be attached to the degree with which they leave us”.

McHugh added that lecturers should finish their lectures early and encourage students to head down to the computer terminals “dedicated to the NSS” located all over the Cambridge and Chelmsford campuses so that they can fill in “a good online response”. He advocates that lecturers “keep pumping out the message” and “get students to march off to a terminal straight away” in addition to informing them of other colleagues who will be sent “out and about... looking for final year students to nobble”. At no point in any of the emails is any reference made to any attempts to improve the issues complained about by ARU students in the NSS.

Responding to suggestions that the survey’s findings might be skewed by students’ self-interest, McHugh said that he did “not approve of crude attempts to persuade students to give their Uni ‘good marks’” but that he did “think it is worth explaining to students how the survey is increasingly being used outside the higher education sector.”

McHugh emphasised the role of the NSS as a channel for feedback, and was joined in his praise of ARU tactics by Frankie Whiffen, Anglia Ruskin Student Union (ARSU) President, who told Varsity: “a lot of students are apathetic and won’t visit their student union, but this is an easy to access way to contact the university.... The university is always trying to gain feedback. This is how it works at Anglia Ruskin.” He added: “we’re not set in our ways, we’re dynamic and changing.”

The NSS push involved “colleagues out and about at Cambridge and Chelmsford looking for final year students to nobble” and NSS stickers on sandwiches sold in the university cafeteria.

In a later email McHugh requested that lecturers “do your bit by discussing the survey” with finalists, who would be sent NSS reminders, and informed staff that there would be survey-dedicated computers in both AR campuses’ libraries.  In a memo to staff, McHugh suggests that “More enthusiastic colleagues may decide to allow a class to finish early and that students are directed to nearby computer terminals to complete the survey!”

Asked if this was an appropriate use of resources, Paul McHugh said that it was “a convenience for our students” and added that ARSU had also provided dedicated terminals. As to whether finalists should be putting the survey before their work, McHugh told Varsity that “students have been reluctant to complete the NSS online which means that they are often pestered by phone later”, and argued that “this is more disruptive and disturbing” than the university’s promotion of the survey. Whiffen told Varsity: ‘It’s not aggressive marketing. You get so much stuff, like junkmail, sent to you all the time.’

CUSU, who staged a protest in which they burnt copies of the survey and promotional material outside their old Trumpington Street offices last year, remain highly critical of the survey and promotes opting-out. CUSU is now the only union in the country to do so after Oxford and Warwick’s student unions ended their opposition.

Last year Cambridge was the only higher education institution in the country not to reach the 50% response rate required by the NSS to publish its findings. The then CUSU Education Officer, Jacob Head, described the NSS as a waste of “precious resources” and its content as “over-simplistic to the point of meaninglessness”. He was highly critical of the “aggressive marketing of the survey”, in which the NSS would telephone students up to eight times to encourage them to complete the survey.

Cambridge has so far refused to pass on students’ phone numbers to the NSS.

Last month Pete Coulthard, current CUSU Academic Affairs Officer, condemned the University for “leaning on the Heads of Houses (e.g. Masters) to put pressure on JCR Presidents to encourage students to participate”. Coulthard also criticised the format of the survey, its over-simplicity and timing, which he claimed has disrupted finalists’ work in past years
CUSU is lobbying the NSS to make a ‘bank’ of additional questions specific to collegiate universities available in the survey. This year’s survey for Cambridge will contain one question on extra opportunities afforded by a collegiate university.
The University supports the NSS and has put pressure on CUSU to change its stance.  It has argued that abstaining from the NSS might adversely affect Cambridge’s reputation for student satisfaction and could discourage state school applications. In response, Coulthard noted Cambridge’s high placing in the league tables for satisfaction, and described the “the deliberate intertwining” the issues of survey participation and access as “unnecessary and unwelcome” and “misleading”.