28th June 2017 1:00
By Blue Tutors
The latest bid by the government to ensure academia cares about the quality of education it delivers to undergraduates, the Teaching Excellence Framework or TEF for short, has published its first round of results. The assessment assigns each university either a gold, silver or bronze according to several assessment factors including results, graduate employment and student satisfaction. In fact, half of the metrics that go into the TEF are derived from student surveys.
The results have been controversial, with several top universities being given only bronze award. While Oxford and Cambridge both received gold awards, UCL, Bristol and SOAS did not make the cut. This was not a surprise given that traditionally, success and standing in academia is based on research excellence. HEFCE, who administer the ratings, have said that this proves the TEF is working, and not simple reinforcing established hierarchies. The aim of the TEF is to “redress the balance” of interest within universities to highlight and reward the importance of teaching alongside research. Over half of universities (116) were awarded silver, with the other half being split roughly evenly between gold and bronze.
It is a high stakes assessment, given that a silver or above is required to be allowed to increase fees in line with inflation in coming years. Many of the Russel Group universities have been outperformed by their ex-polytechnic counterparts that perform much more poorly on the Research Excellence Framework, receiving less grant money. This is as results are not compared on an even basis, but are adjusted to account for the student intake mix and courses on offer. With the first results now out, there are however still some patterns emerging; a higher entry average UCAS score and a lower proportion of students from a low-income background or state schools does give a higher likelihood of gold or silver award. The system’s ‘benchmarking’ has however done a lot to mitigate for this and there is a lot more variation between universities within each award group than between the group averages.
While some pressure on universities to ensure quality of teaching is welcomed by students, the assessment rates but does not actually monitor or evaluate teaching directly at all. Like any system that uses a proxy measure to evaluate something, this leaves it open to manipulation; already students are boycotting the surveys used. Equally, it is conflict of interest for universities to link fee increases to student satisfaction, and also incentivised grade inflation in order to improve marks as well as graduate prospects and student opinion. Academics say it also creates the ‘tick-box’ culture that stifles innovation, a key driver of excellence in further education and research.
How will the TEF look as it moves forward? The benchmarking process to account for student affluence and background appears to be working to some extent, but may need to be improved given the trends that were seen in this year’s categorisation. Many institutions, however, feel that the lack of transparency in the benchmarking process as well as the fact that each institution is up or downgraded using a different set of benchmarks, makes the metric intrinsically unequal and unfair. The London universities, for example, fared considerably worse than the rest of the UK, being almost three times more likely to be awarded bronze than institutions outside London. Many leading universities including LSE and goldsmiths were given a bronze award. This bias against London may be due to increased cost of living in the capital which increases drop-out rates and student dissatisfaction.
Some feel that rankings should be awarded on a course by course basis, instead of to the university as a whole, much like the university rankings; however, this would pose a serious problem where courses with very few students, or no direct comparison at other universities. There has been a suggestion to include graduate earnings as a factor, a move which has been widely criticised, given that in the eyes of academic, the aim of undergraduate study is to gain skills and knowledge in a subject area and not necessarily for employment. Equally this would disadvantage universities in areas of lower income and those with a subject mix skewed towards lower graduate earning degrees, such as those in the arts, compared more STEM focussed institutions.
For better or for worse, the TEF appears to be here to stay, although it is already an investigation scheduled after just one year so it is likely there will be changes to the form it takes. For now, the ratings should be taken with a pinch of salt and applicants should remember that the rankings are only really relevant when comparing similar universities.