Providing guidance (or not!) to students on how to answer the questions in the NSS

 

The NSS questionnaire is relatively easy to understand for a final year undergraduate and hopefully self-explanatory.  However, there will inevitably be some students with queries about the survey.

A range of guidance is supplied to students by Ipsos MORI via the NSS website.  These are included in the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQs), information about the survey and the ‘Privacy Statement’. Should students have any specific queries relating to the survey, they should contact Ipsos MORI through their dedicated helpline at: thestudentsurvey@ipsos.com

One thing is clear though: institutions should not be giving instructions to students on how to complete the survey. Attempts to do so could be interpreted as an effort to ‘influence’ the students’ understanding of the survey/questions.  Sanctions against miscreant institutions can be public and severe: HEFCE removed one University department from the League Tables as its sanction for having fraudulently manipulated the National Student Survey results.