Earlier this year, I summarised the student academic experience here at UCL in just 10 pages as part of the most recent Teaching Excellence Framework.
I found that you most enjoyed what you were being taught (module content) and how you are taught it (teaching delivery), and that you feel that we need to work with UCL on your study workload and the feedback you receive (both the timing and quality of the feedback).
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is run by the Office for Students and assesses undergraduate student outcomes and the student academic experience every four years. Each university in England is assessed on their National Student Survey (NSS) results and a written submission giving context to those NSS results, and this year they wanted to hear directly from students via an optional student submission (written and submitted independently by students at the university).
The student submission is there to reflect the experiences of students and their views on their academic experience which helps to inform the TEF assessment. As the Students’ Union, we have a rich evidence base and a variety of students’ union-led and university-led research into the student experience here at UCL. From this, I was able to develop a narrative on how the student academic experience has changed from 2018-2019 to the current academic year.
We analysed 29 different reports and data sources to develop a coherent picture of the UCL academic experience from 2018-2019 to 2021-2022. These reports are listed in the submission and represent ~30,000 data points and 26,000 students. We developed our narrative by leaning more heavily on the data sources that were representative of our undergraduate population with large data sets (such as our Priorities for Education annual reports and the New to UCL survey results) and supplemented those reports with smaller data sets for additional nuance and detail.
To help shape our narrative on the current student academic experience, we engaged with ~400 current students in a variety of different ways such as student focus groups, workshops with Lead Department Reps and Faculty Reps and surveys. A key part in this process was that we presented drafts to our policy zones in Term 1 to ensure that what we were writing was representative.
The final version of TEF student submission was presented to Union Executive prior to submission in January. We should find out what UCL’s rating is in September. Find out more about the Teaching Excellence Framework.
Students' Union UCL Teaching Excellence Framework Submission
You can download our summary of the student academic experience and student outcomes in the UCL Teaching Excellence Framework Student Submission via the links below: