Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

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chivers61
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Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by chivers61 »

https://edition.thestage.co.uk/2018/05/ ... index.html

Interesting read. Intriguing drop from 2nd to 16th for GSA.
Sherbert
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by Sherbert »

Would love to read this but it won’t let me =; [-X
If anyone could copy and paste it? 8-[ x
Sherbert
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by Sherbert »

Scrap that ^^
I managed to get in
chivers61
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by chivers61 »

Sherbert wrote:Scrap that ^^
I managed to get in
That's good. I did wonder if it would work as I have a subscription and logged on to copy and paste the link.
Scarytimes
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by Scarytimes »

You can go direct to the report at https://www.theguardian.com/education/n ... rama-dance if you prefer.

I've looked in a bit more detail for GSA (Surrey Dance and Drama) drop as it concerns me especially as the drops are in the three student satisfaction questions. Though the value added is actually better. I guess a lot of this data for standard degrees doesn't fit well with what our DCs want out of their degree really. I'm a bit hazy as the figures cover all 12 courses classified as Dance and Drama at GSA, so film studies and things like that as well and Acting and Musical Theatre and Dance.

I see this report is based on 2017 figures from NSS survey - with a few data problems from boycotts and change of questions. I talked to DS and he said current GSA students are very enthusiastic about the course/teaching and he wonders if this data co-incides with the big change from the previous director leaving.

It could be that respondents to the survey ended up having a big changeover in their third year and change causes havoc with surveys. I have run several organisation-wide surveys in my job and we always have to look out for contributory factors such as change in leadership, poor yearly pay awards, drop in company profits, and structural changes when looking at employee satisfaction, so that explanation works for me if the dates are right.

What does everyone else think?
DGtherunner
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by DGtherunner »

When you drill into the data in the Guardian link, it just shows they are comparing apples with oranges. Some scores are based on 2 or 3 academic English with drama courses, others on 12 or 13 practical based courses and some are a complete mixture! At GSA it does look like something went on with the 2017 NSS scores, but because of the relatively small numbers on these courses, if one course had a problem it would pull the score down for all the others, or if a group of students decide to make a point, or feel particularly aggrieved about something then their viewpoint ends up counting more than with some of the bigger student number courses. The data doesn't show how many students were on each course. Hard to make a judgement based on a one year drop. If you've spoken to current students and they're happy, then that's probably what to base your judgement on.
Scarytimes
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by Scarytimes »

DGtherunner wrote:When you drill into the data in the Guardian link, it just shows they are comparing apples with oranges. Some scores are based on 2 or 3 academic English with drama courses, others on 12 or 13 practical based courses and some are a complete mixture! At GSA it does look like something went on with the 2017 NSS scores, but because of the relatively small numbers on these courses, if one course had a problem it would pull the score down for all the others, or if a group of students decide to make a point, or feel particularly aggrieved about something then their viewpoint ends up counting more than with some of the bigger student number courses. The data doesn't show how many students were on each course. Hard to make a judgement based on a one year drop. If you've spoken to current students and they're happy, then that's probably what to base your judgement on.
Looking more at the NSS survey issue with changed questions "However, the Higher Education Funding Council for England cautioned against comparing satisfaction results with previous years, saying that the inclusion of new questions had changed student response patterns."

Quite! You design a survey to ask what you think are some sensible questions, then you get the data, divide it into categories then wonder what on earth it is telling you :? Not that I'm ignoring the data entirely, we will just take it as a single bit of evidence within a whole raft of other things. If DS gets in, I think it is unlikely that we would turn it down.
Scarytimes
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Re: Stage article re Drama Uni rankings

Post by Scarytimes »

Scarytimes wrote:
Quite! You design a survey to ask what you think are some sensible questions, then you get the data, divide it into categories then wonder what on earth it is telling you :? Not that I'm ignoring the data entirely, we will just take it as a single bit of evidence within a whole raft of other things. If DS gets in, I think it is unlikely that we would turn it down.
I see the NSS survey 2018 results are out. Happily GSA scored very well this year. Maybe things have calmed down now the change of leadership/management has happened? Who knows! My pet hate with NSS survey is that it is very hard to weed out Musical Theatre stuff - easy if you want to study politics or chemistry, but the arts subjects are quite jumbled together. I guess the college gets a better print out of data than we can see as the main colleges have published their overall satisfaction for each course in turn.
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