News in Brief – Issue 223

Survey Flaws

The validity of the National Student Survey (NSS) has been called into question after research has revealed the ease with which a university could impersonate a student.

While there is no concrete evidence that York (or any other institution for that matter) has actually skewed any data by completing the survey on behalf of a student and hence corrupting the results, the worry is that they easily could, due to the fundamental security flaws with the form.

To access the NSS, a student only has to provide the name of his/her institution, student number, the day and the month of their birth and the first initial and first four letters of their surname.

A lot of this information is already held by the University, and failing that, as social networking sites such as Facebook make a lot of students’ vital statistics available to anyone.

The NSS is conducted by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and is important for university rankings. In 2011, 87% of York third-years agreed that they were satisfied with their course.

Late Feedback

Concerns have been raised over some departments being late on returning feedback and marks from last January’s assessment period.

Numerous departments, including Maths, Politics and English, recorded delays despite a stringent six-week marking returning policy as implemented by the University at the beginning of this academic year.

Second-year English students suffered results delays of up to a week for modules taken during the Autumn Term. One affected English student complained: “If I submit an essay late, I’m deducted 10 marks. As far as I can see, the return of our essays to us is subject to more liberal timing.” He received no response from the department.

A similar problem arose with Maths feedback. A second-year Maths student from Halifax, who wished to remain anonymous, also voiced concerns: “I wanted to stick to modules I was best at, but my modules didn’t get the results back until after we had to choose. However, other modules received their marks on time.”

When questioned by Vision, the affected departments refused to comment on the issue – despite almost all the delays being unexplained.

However, Graeme Osborn, YUSU Academic Officer, said he had “not received any formal complaints.”