There’s an exclusion that appears interesting in the new Graduate Outcomes Survey (from the team that delivers the excellent Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching)

The GOS (CMM yesterday) reports questions relating to generic skills and teaching were dropped from the survey “at the request of the QILT working group.” The overall satisfaction measure remained.

“Aha!” thought CMM, “universities who fear grads thinking badly of them wanted the data out.” But no – in fact universities value graduate reports on their performance and observers suggest some may even pay to have it collected for their own use.

The reasons the questions went is data housekeeping – there are three sets of satisfaction data across the QILT suite (students, graduates, employers) which don’t all align. Officials also feared complex questions in the grad survey could be driving down response rates.