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What is Academic Quality Assurance and Why Should Student Associations Care?

The history of universities is one of students caring about academic quality. The first western university, the University of Bologna, was originally created not from a bunch of scholars convening to do research, or the government investing in the education of its citizenry, but of students self-organizing to hire high-quality tutelage.

This student-driven focus has faded from universities as faculty self-governance within laws set by governments have become the norm in Canada, especially reinforced by the Flavelle Commission, a 1906 document that laid the groundwork for a nationwide norm of University Senates, dominated by academics. This was also buttressed by a later report in 1966. Students might commonly have some seats on the Senate, but we’re a long way from students making hiring and firing decisions (and that’s a good thing, because institutions change!)

Status Quo

But the status quo isn’t perfect either. The institution has evolved and academic freedom is important. Students shouldn’t be making firing decisions. However, students are increasingly outside of the process of quality assurance.

Students might participate in course reviews, which are a crude way to provide feedback on individual courses and professors, without a substantial systematic perspective on curriculum.

While the university may have financial incentive to maximize revenue, that is not identical to providing high-quality education. University instructors and faculty unions alike have multiple incentives, of which academic quality is only one.

Sometimes individuals or departments want to pull in students to internal curriculum reviews, but there is another process where student associations might want to leverage themselves to improve academic quality.

Institutional Quality Processes

Provinces typically force universities to do “institutional quality assurance”, which ensures that new programs have academic merit and rigour, and usually some form of ongoing review as well, conducted by groups of academics from other institutions.

Students can be involved in the review, either through filling surveys for a “self-study” conducted by the program in advance of the external review, or being interviewed by external reviewers themselves.

This involvement can be useful, but there is also the potential for students to be even more systematic, creating meaningful recommendations that are taken seriously.

This feels like a job for the limited resources of department-level student associations. Those resource limitations aren’t the focus of this blog, but to overcome those limitations, the resources and support of centralized student associations are likely the key to successfully asserting themselves in this space.

Whither from here?

There are two directions that I can see student associations taking. The first is one where they work in close partnership with the institutions that they are a part of, and have their role in self-study solidified, preferably by formal means.

In the voluntary case, student associations would submit their “student review” to the institution’s quality assurance office. What’s in that review? I’ll get to that in a moment.

The second alternative is the student association is locked out. This might be at a institution-wide level, or the institution might give autonomy to departments to integrate student groups or not.

In that second case, worry not, I propose that associations engage in an “Independent Student Quality Assurance Program” or ISQAP, which would look nearly identical to one where they are integrated into the process.

The association would first submit their findings to the provost for a period awaiting an official response.

If no response is received, the association would work to publicize their findings outwardly, to news outlets and to prospective students instead of to the university, providing pressure for the university to adopt its recommendations.

So what would these student reviews look like?

What’s the niche?

If you look at a typical academic program review, a certain flavour is often present in these documents, one that focuses on course offerings from a managerial side and has a big focus on recruitment. Take one that I was involved with and is an example of a well-done review. This is the review for the history undergraduate program at the University of Waterloo. The document isn’t long, but it goes into a fair amount of detail on enrollments and completions, the size of courses and into internal governance.

But I think there is space for students to contribute. What if a student association endeavoured to go beyond this?

Ordinary students are at the least qualified to opine on the following:

• Perceptions of what they are learning and what they should be learning
• Enjoyment and mental health
• Departmental culture
• Lived experiences

The following are areas where students may not individually be able to provide informed advice, but where expertise can be gained through investment in association capacity, through research and identifying best educational practices:

• Demonstration of effective teaching techniques
• Course design and pedagogy
• Holistic assessments of curriculum
• Comparative study of curriculum compared to other institutions
• Employability and skills development

Combining these two areas of expertise can help associations craft a substantial and useful supplement to internal self-study.

Preparation

So what does it take to do this?

The first step is a student association breaking time-based barriers. They would create a single point of contact for academic feedback from students at any time, not just during a few focus groups around review time. This would allow for a wider scan of concerns as they arise, and provide more material for student associations to do further research on or run focus groups during a later intense review period.

A second step is associations generating a guidebook with the student association’s outlook on universal principles for effective program design. This guidebook could also have potential specific principles applicable for social sciences, physical sciences, humanities and other broad academic subdivisions. For example, a set of best practices may conclude that:

• All STEM graduates should graduate with at least 5 credits in labs or research skills,
• All graduates, regardless of program, should have 2 credits in experiential learning
• That discussion courses in humanities should have professors speaking no more than 40% of the classtime.

A third step is building training resources for departmental society leadership, including overviews of the process, how to conduct research, and overviews of how the campus-wide association can support if the departmental association agrees to invite the campus-wide association to conduct a review. This is crucial, as this model does not work without substantial participation of departmental student society partners.

Execution

When the time comes for a review, a student association will want to review the following freely available resources:

• The structure of program requirements and additional certifications (like specializations)
• Course offerings
• Advertised materials for the program and branding

This should be supplemented by doing some research or making use of the preparation resources such as:

• Running student focus groups asking a standard battery of questions, as well as specific follow-ups based on previously collected feedback
• Observing how well course offerings and program requirements adhere to best practices
• Conducting surveys of alumni through informal use of social networks to establish what percentage sought employment in a field related to the program and their success, as well as perceptions of ways in which the program was strong, or where skills or knowledge available was deficient
• A mystery shopper program where students volunteer to record the behaviours of certain professors during instruction, or to assess course materials (or share them with the association if policy permits)
• A comparison of overall curricular design with similar programs elsewhere
• Validation or invalidation of findings from the above methods, including by posing questions to a departmental representative such as a department chair

Product

Using these findings, and with the collaboration of the association and leadership of the departmental association, they might produce a document that resembles this:

The outputs, the format, the research and the process should be made flexible, since this is a theoretical set of instructions, rather than one that has been done and refined in practice.

Resourcing

To produce a document like this wouldn’t be easy, taking a conservative 50 paid hours, and more realistically around 70-90, with the potential that the total could be even higher. This is aside from the time that would be used to generate an enduring best practices handbook.

This would mean that a trained professional at $70,000 a year could conceivably complete approximately 20 of these reviews a year, at a cost of $3,500 a review. This would exceed the number of reviews needed for a large school such as the University of Toronto, which regularly reviews approximately 12 programs a year. This means a large student association could conceivably conduct these reviews as a 0.5FTE position. Assuming a review every 7 years and average program size of 200 students, this would cost an average student approximately $2.50 per year as a service for a student association to offer.

Coda

This is far from the only way that student associations can work to flex their muscle in the academic quality space. Associations can assert themselves in conversations about evaluation of teaching, creating a culture of collaboration with the institution on pedagogical improvements, or act as a convening voice to bring together stakeholders on campus to collectively instigate new projects that promote quality.

But the specific investments in quality assurance are investments that have huge impacts for the quality of credentials, as well as being an area where student associations can conceivably have a credible impact on public perception of programs. It is this perception that drives recruitment, and that is one area in which universities will always pay attention if they are getting a bad rap.

So student association leaders, good luck in exploring this, and finding other ways to assert yourself in the quality space, its fertile ground!