News from Australia

There is now a website MyUniversity that allows anyone to compare Australian public universities for  attributes such as staff qualifications, student to staff ratio, graduate employment and so on.

Of course, the value of the site will be little better than the quality of the information uploaded. Perhaps someone could take a look at the site and see how accurate the data is.

According to University World News , the Australian faculty staff union is not happy.

'Rea said that if students were looking to base their choice of institution on whether a campus had an automatic teller machine, the site might be useful. But if they wanted an indication of the quality of teaching and research at any given institution, the information provided relied on a set of indicators that had been under question for many years.

The union had been critical for some time of the misuse of statistical data, such as graduate employment outcomes and student satisfaction results, in determining the quality of learning and teaching. Yet these were included as measurable indicators of quality by the website.

“The use of student satisfaction scores in particular is prone to manipulation and does not reflect quality in teaching. Indeed, if institutions based their courses on whether students liked their subjects, which is essentially what these metrics capture, they would risk driving down the quality of degrees from Australian universities.

“There is always a danger of teaching to the test – or the survey, in this case,” Rea said.

She said the diversity of Australian universities made it difficult to attempt any comparisons. Although the union believed students should be able to make an informed choice of where best to study, it should be just that – an informed choice based on accurate, clear and transparent information.

“This can only happen if the indicators or measures used to create this information are specific, widely understood and agreed, and incapable of institutional manipulation.” '