Last week had a slightly ‘Ground
Hog Day’ feel to it. One recurring theme was the National Student Survey (NSS).
In the company of others I spent time looking back at last year’s results and forward to the next NSS, due to start in January
2014. Every year since 2005, Ipsos MORI conducts the NSS. The survey provides
an opportunity for students to feedback
on their experiences of study at their University. The results are important as
these are published and used by students (and possibly their parents) in selecting
a University to study at.
The results are also important as
they contribute to where each University is located on the various national and international league tables that describe the quality of research, education and employment prospects of graduates. High performing institutions
will attract both high performing students and academics. Interestingly in a study
published last week by the London School of Economics, they noted the benefit
of individuals who were high performing, rather than the institutions they studied
at.
The LSE study was looking at primary
children and not University students however. Their study involved 2 million
children, and was conducted across all types of primary schools. The study found that being seen as a high flyer in a
primary school, regardless of the child’s actual ability was a strong motivator
for their performance in secondary school. Boys were 4 times more
affected by being top of the class than girls. The suggestion that pupils benefited
from being top of a weak class, rather than being middle ranking in a class of
high-performing children really does challenge the conventional wisdom that
children will do better if pushed into a higher performing peer group.
And in a week where I was being
asked to report on the number of 3* and 4* quality publications each of my
colleagues had published in the last quarter, I was interested to read of
someone who was also challenging conventional wisdom. This was the Nobel Prize
Winner Randy Schekman, who last week claimed that leading academic journals are
distorting the process of science and represent a
‘tyranny’ which must be
broken. He has declared a boycott on such publications. Schekman, a US
biologist who was presented with the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine last
Tuesday said his laboratory would no longer send research papers to the
top-tier journals,
Nature,
Cell and
Science.
He also attacked the widespread
metric called an ‘impact factor’ used by many top-tier journals. A journals
impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is used as
proxy for quality. Schekman said the 'impact factor' was a toxic influence on science and
introduced a distortion – a paper can become highly cited because it is eye catching,
provocative or wrong.
I went out last week to one of my favourite
restaurants (
Albert’s Shed) for what I had hoped was going to be a meal with a high impact
factor, a meal I thought was both eye catching and provocative. However, I was wrong. My favourite starter, asparagus, with a poached egg
covered in bread crumbs, was off the menu. My favourite main course, a cheese
and onion pie, was on, but to be frank, it simply wasn't that good. I was disappointed.
Telling a friend the next day, I mistakenly wrote
‘cheese and opinion’ pie, which
more closely described the second cheese and onion pie I had later on in the week
at
Chancellors.
I was there with other Heads of
School and Deans from the North West, and we were meeting with Laura Roberts, the
Managing Director of Health Education North West. This is the organisation responsible
for spending over £700,000 million a year on educating and training health care
professionals in the North West. It was an interesting conversation, made so by
colleague’s willingness to offer and debate their thoughts on the challenges
facing health care educators. I also found out that Laura and I once had the same mentor and
‘rabbi’,
the wise Bill Sang, someone not shy of challenging me or conventional wisdom. And the cheese and onion pie, well it was just exquisite.
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