Oz graduates offer tips on course rating

A graduate questionnaire used to assess the quality of university teaching in Australia is an economical method of identifying courses in need of inspection and more efficient than the British system of visiting departments, according to a visiting Australian academic.

The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) has been developed by Paul Ramsden, director of the Griffith Institute for Higher Education at Griffith University in Brisbane.

Professor Ramsden will give a keynote address at the fourth Improving Student Learning Symposium organised by Oxford Brookes University in Bath next week.

He said this week that the fact that 99 per cent of departments were rated satisfactory or higher in the most recent United Kingdom teaching assessments indicated that another approach was needed. Peer review tended to be overgenerous and failed to identify areas of weakness, he said.

The CEQ was developed from research by Professor Ramsden at Lancaster University in the early 1980s on the characteristics of university courses that are associated with high-quality student learning.

The survey has been used in Australia for the past three years and completed by more than 80,000 recent graduates.

Professor Ramsden said that the results have revealed significant variations in subject areas between universities and that old universities did not have a monopoly on excellent courses.

It has also been found that courses with a high reputation are often also regarded as very good by graduates.

This type of questionnaire should not be used in isolation, but in conjunction with other indicators such as peer review and employers' opinions to build up a full picture of quality, he said.