The findings of the fourth national student survey (NSS) published this month will be used to drive up academic standards in universities.

The pledge comes from Professor Michael Arthur, chairman of the survey’s steering group and the vice-chancellor at Leeds University, in the wake of publication of the results from 220,000 final-year students.

More students contributed to this year’s survey than any of the previous three. For the first time, all universities taking part achieved the 50% response rate required for their data to be released. And all seven categories of the 22-question survey showed overall satisfaction levels up by 1%-2%.

The NSS was introduced in 2005 shortly after the individual subject review programme — where academics rated their peers — was discontinued. “Vice-chancellors are taking the results very seriously,” says Arthur. “They all have action plans related to the outcomes, so the quality enhancement aspect of the NSS is very important. It’s working better than subject review in that respect.”

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Even this year’s student assessment and feedback section saw scores climb from 62% to 64% overall, although it remains well behind all other sections of the survey, some of which gained satisfaction ratings 20% higher. “It shows that we need to work very much harder on assessment and feedback, as it still lags behind. But it is improving,” says Arthur.

Publication of the results followed a difficult year for the NSS with repeated allegations of attempts to influence the findings by university staff eager to avoid poor ratings. “The integrity of the data is crucial,” Arthur warns. Where university departments are deemed to have interfered with the survey’s findings, data for the department concerned will be suppressed from the NSS, he says.

As the NSS slowly replaces (the still useful) subject reviews carried out by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (www.qaa.ac.uk) in our league table, its greater influence can be seen in the rankings. St Andrews, Exeter and Leicester are all riding high at least in part because of exceptional scores in the NSS.

Imperial and LSE lie in third and fourth places in spite of poor NSS scores, which ranks them 97= and 107 respectively for student satisfaction. Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol (ranked 103=, 105= and 108 respectively) all fall in our overall table off the back of poor satisfaction scores.

So a word of caution: don’t choose your university solely on the basis of whose students seem happiest. Overall scores can be misleading; much more useful are the individual subject scores, detailed on pages 58-63 of this guide. For example, biology students at Bristol give a 79% satisfaction rating compared with 62% for politics. Subject ratings show real differences in perceived quality within the same institution, regardless of its overall score.

Barry Taylor, director of communications at the University of Bristol, gets it about right. “The NSS is a good and useful thing, but the results should be handled with care. “For example, students at leading institutions may be especially aspirational. Such characteristics probably helped them get in. They set the benchmark high for others as well as themselves — and rightly so.

“It’s best to see the NSS, like league tables, as an indicator, rather than the be-all and end-all. It should be considered alongside insights that can be gleaned from visits, guides, online social networks and so forth.”

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