Here in the Geology department of the Herringshaw University of Lifelong Learning, we are delighted to announce our results from the 2020 Notional Student Survey.
Below is a summary of our performance in the five key areas of Mental Health & Wellbeing, Teaching & Research, Assessment, Feedback, and Overall Satisfaction.
It has been an exceptional year!
1. Overall satisfaction
Student satisfaction for Geology hit a record high of 94%, thanks to our deal with Honest Jeff's Premium Workwear (TM). All our students received brand-new HULL-branded boiler suits free of charge, immediately before beginning their final-year dissertation field- or lab-work. We are confident the satisfaction score would have been 100%, but for the two students mapping in western Ireland, who found that our goatskin colour choice made them a target for amorous wild rams, causing stress and incontinence. We will be reviewing this with Honest Jeff for 2020-21.
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| Painful. |
2. Feedback
Our feedback levels this year went up to 11, for which we apologize. We think this was due to mis-wiring between the Panopticon and the Hearing Loop in the lecture theatres, and will be speaking to the HULL audio-visual team about this. We will also be learning from this year's experience, and deeply regret the distress caused to the students in the front row of the main lecture theatre, whose spectacles exploded when the PowerPoint audio was switched on by Professor Rogerson.
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| Sound. |
3. Assessment
There have been a number of issues with our discontinuous grading scheme only offering marks of 48% or 84% for all assignments. We understand that this has caused concern for some students, particularly as our virtual learning platform, Worthquake, automatically rejects grades of over 80%. We have listened to student concerns, and will be implementing the following policy for 2020-21 onwards:
All first-year assessment will be graded out of 100, using all 100 available integers. At the end of the first year, a student's year-mark will be released. Students will then be offered a final degree classification one level below their first year-mark, and asked if they wish to accept it. So, if a student's first year-mark is 70% or higher, they will be offered a final degree classification of 2:1; if 60-69%, a 2:2; 50-59%, a Third; and 40-49%, an Ordinary degree.
If students accept this offer, they must only pass their second and third year modules to secure the offered degree. If they do not wish to accept this offer, they proceed as normal with their degree, with second and third year-marks then weighted at 33.34% and 66.66% respectively.
Second and third year module marks will be shown on a student's transcript, regardless of which route the student has chosen, so if they accept a 2:1 at the end of the first year, and then go on to score 41% for everything subsequently, they will find themselves having to explain this at job interviews.
Our Associate Dean for Education has expressed concern over this approach, but we are very pleased to confirm that they have been over-ruled by our thirteen new PVCs for Performance-Integrated Student Satisfaction, reporting to the government's new Office for Revising Wrong Educational Learning Levels.
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| Edible. |
4. Reaching and Tea-search
Following last year's poor performance, where 107% of our final-year students reported dissatisfaction, we have made all ground-floor staff redundant and converted their offices into tea rooms, installing easily accessible low-level shelving and cupboard units in each of these, packed full of biscuits. The Associate Dean for Education voiced concerns over our possible misinterpretation of the wording of this category, but our 2020 NSS McVities Quotient of 97% means these have been quickly assuaged.
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| Stimulating. |
5. Mental Wealth and Hell-being
As our extremely well-remunerated former Vice Chancellor has confirmed from his garnet-encrusted retirement castle in Monaco, vast wealth is the key to happiness. It had been noted in the past five Notional Student Surveys that our graduates were going into menial, low-paid careers such as teaching, primary care, and university research. As such, career management consultants Schwartzfurt, Ferrari & Jeames were brought in to help our students to visualize vast piles of gold, and learn how to change one's personality into the Satanic mindset required to succeed in today's cut-throat world.
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| Temptation. |
We are sure our staff, students, graduates, alumni, and donors will agree these are a fantastical set of results for NSS 2020, and we look forward to building upon, and then demolishing them, in 2021.
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