You might think that the univerisity is a paragon of truth, after all don’t they live in ivory towers?

The reality is nothing could be further from the truth! For instance I noted the other day that the University of Huddersfield announces that it is ‘top’ for teaching quality among all the ‘new’ universities in the north of England and what’s more, is also the ‘top’ new university for customer satisfaction among its students .. wow! that sounds impressive, until that is you start thinking about it a little. Then it dawns on you that in actual fact this is a far more modest claim than it first appears.

Why pray tell? Well, the first is dispensed with by the relatively small number of new universities in the north, notwithstanding that it is a bit of a contrived category. The second ‘customer satisfaction rating’ is even more dubious. This because it suffeers from what researchers call the ‘inter-rater reliability problem’ - although this is no mere problem, its more of a show stopper!

The issue is you cannot be sure your comparing like with like. If a student at Cambridge rates say his ‘academic support’ as ‘fair’ and a student at Huddersfield feels his is ‘good’ what does that tell us? Well, not much actually. Not unless we know what they mean by ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because we would need to know their using the same measurable scales (like on a ruler for instance) if our goal is to compare institutions. Can we really assume that ‘fair’ at Cambridge is worse than ‘good’ at Huddersfield?

Of course all of these type of claims and the eagerness to make them is just a marketing exercise, and like all marketing, it is a half truth masquerading as a whole truth. One thing for sure is that the days are long gone when universities were ivory towers .. and this bodes ill for the under researched and niavee prospective student.

You have been warned!