The NSS: Unfit for Purpose

The first and fundamental assumption is that NSS scores reflect teaching quality. The OfS describes it as gathering ‘students’ opinions on the quality of their courses’, which is obviously slightly different: it is a proxy measure. This is not to say that students’ perspectives are not valuable – they are – but pedagogy takes many forms, and a session or course may work well one year and not the next, or well for some groups and not for others. More...