Amongst other League tables, "helpful data", information, rumour, branding and hype that bombard the prospective HE student in the UK comes the Key Information Set - KIS for short. The KIS for a degree programme contains useful information on costs, "satisfaction" as measured by the National Student Survey, Graduate destinations (employment %), entry qualifications and, oh, what's that lurking near the bottom of the page? -STUDY INFORMATION.
In KIS terms the study information comes from the accounting perspective of valuing what we can measure rather than measuring what we value (and acknowledging that, sometimes, there are features and aspects of experiences that cannot be measured). So, what do we have?
1. % of assessments represented by exams
2. Contact hours
Errr that's it.
What can that possibly tell prospective students about the quality of teaching and learning? Such a pity that the designers of KIS and those Universities (all of them) that rushed to abide by such stupid rules did not read Chris Rust's excellent "What we know about Assessment" and Graham Gibbs' "Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing". Both books are entertainingly written, free!!!! as ebooks and research informed (you have to say that to get the attention of research academics). Gibbs' book may be dated (1981) but still echoes loudly as successive generations, in larger numbers, are subjected to a system that considers that TEACHING (and the more of it shovelled at students the better) = LEARNING.
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