Why the NSS matters

If you are a final year Undergraduate student then you have probably heard of the National Student Survey (NSS) by now. If you didn’t then I suggest checking your junk folder! The NSS is an annual survey sent to all final-year Undergraduate students across the UK and contains 23 questions that cover the quality of teaching, of feedback, of the library and more. The overall satisfaction rate of the students is then published in August in a league table; last summer the College’s Overall satisfaction rate was at 87%, against a sector average of 86%.

While this league table is a nice indicator for us to see where we stand it isn’t the main reason why the NSS is so important and why we need a high turnout of participation. With the results we formulate recommendations to the College on how to improve the student satisfaction and what areas the College needs to focus on. These recommendations are backed by comments made by students in the survey, a link to our last response can be found here. The College takes these responses serious and act upon those, for example they introduced the student support programme STARFISH last year and are currently undertaking a lot of work on improving the timetabling system. The departments themselves provide action plans to the College on how they will improve. These recommendations and plans need to be backed up by high participation turnout for them to be valid, otherwise people could say that not everyone feels this way and it is therefore not necessary to follow that issue further.

That is not to say the NSS is more important than SOLE. With SOLE you rate individual courses, with the NSS you reflect on your course, think about the positives and negatives and rate your entire experience.

I know there has been a lot of nagging for the NSS and dozens of emails. But there are only three days left so if you haven’t completed the NSS yet, you might as well head over here and complete it, it only takes ten minutes.