Students need more clarity about what happens to student course and teaching evaluations if those evaluations are to be regarded with more respect, according to the director of the New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit, John Jennings.

All our universities have student feedback integrated into their quality self-assessment – process, with students generally being asked to answer a handful of generic questions about the quality of the course they are studying and the teaching they are receiving.  The generic course information from those feedback forms is normally made available to the heads of departments concerned and the specific comments to the teachers in question.  However, Mr. Jennings believes that students are unaware about what happens after that point.

“It’s not clear what is happening in terms of how it is used or how the changes that result are fed back to students. That was one area that we noted during cycle three of our audits (2003-2006) that clearly needed attention.”

Mr Jennings says he can sympathise with parents trying to decide which is the right course or institution for their child to attend, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that New Zealand needs to adopt a public evaluation system of university courses similar to that operating in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

“That’s a genuine concern from the perspective of parents.  It can be difficult for people to choose a university. They often have to go by peer reputation.”

However he says that it is hard to compare apples with apples when assessing universities against each other because they all have such different cultures.  “The only way to take the gamble out of it and provide public comparison of courses across universities would be to have a standardised test and I don’t know if there is value there or not,” concluded Mr Jennings.