The Student Written Submission 2011
The Students’ Union is here to help you shape your learning experience and make sure that your voice is heard by the School. Now we offer you a unique opportunity to have a genuine impact on what happens at LSE.
The QAA Institutional Audit
Every five years LSE gets externally audited on its academic standards and the quality of its academic provision by the
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).
As part of this, the Students’ Union will put together a
Student Written Submission based on your thoughts about the School, and what could improve over the next five years. Every student has an opportunity to be part of this process and directly inform the outcomes of the Report that we will submit.
WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR?
We got the views and ideas of over 650 students on how they felt about the student experience and learning at LSE. We then held focus groups to explore the issues in more detail. Through these we got students to assess the School's performance in the areas of teaching and learning support, feedback and assessment, course organisation and learning facilities; finally, the effectiveness of feedback and communications with the School.
We published the initial findings on 22 November and got students to tell us if we had understood them correctly or what further we needed to explore.
Our Report
We published our final report to the School and the QAA at the beginning of January.
This can be downloaded from here.
Priority Recommendations to the School
Priority Recommendation 01
Address the ‘lottery effect’ problem by putting in place a better quality monitoring mechanisms that could ensure that teachers and academic advisors meet satisfactorily the minimum expectations specified by students
Priority Recommendation 02
Amend the School’s policy on summative feedback so that all Departments are required to provide some form of feedback to students on their exam performance
Priority Recommendation 03
The School should urgently improve its communications of survey results - put in place an infrastructure to close the feedback loop and make teaching scores more widely available to students
Priority Recommendation 04
LSESU & the School should develop an academic representation & feedback strategy which addresses
- The purpose of different types of feedback & representation within the School
- Support & training for SSLC representatives
- Relationship between representatives at SSLC level through to Court of Governors; how do we identify School-wide trends and how do we empower student representatives at high level meetings to be effective?
- The resource needed to support this
Priority Recommendation 05
At a strategic level within the School, consider the fundamental question about the role of how students shape
What happens next?
The Auditors are coming at the start of Febuary and March to talk to students, staff and the Students' Union about what the final report should be.