Oxbridging The Gap
FORMER POLYTECHNICS ARE doing as well as or even outperforming Oxford in teaching quality assessments. Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) inspections, which are haunting the PPE department this term, consistently awarded Oxford the same or lower marks than universities that are widely regarded as academically less strong.
Oxford scored the maximum 24 points in Biosciences in March this year, but this was no unique achievement, matched not only by Cambridge and York but also by the universities of Kingston, Nottingham Trent and the West of England. Top performers in Art and Design, on the other hand, included the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Falmouth College of Arts, as well as Oxford University.
In Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research, the results were even more seemingly discouraging as Oxford was awarded 22 points - the same as our neighbour Oxford Brookes and indeed lower than City university, which scored 23 points. The picture was similarly bleak in Physics and Astronomy, in which Nottingham Trent gained 24 points while Oxford gained 23.
In response to these results, Professor Newell, Head of Biochemistry, lamented that "these numbers send the wrong message to the public" as "the whole point" of these inspections was whether the goals of the particular department were being met. He said: "I would like to think that Oxford has greater goals than former polytechnics", which are more difficult to meet than the goals of many other universities. Dr Patterson, whose Modern Languages department scored less than Brookes in 1996, also criticised the QAA inspections for being a "very mechanistic system" which inappropriately tries to measure all universities according to "a particular model".
Even City University was modest about its better performance in Maths. A Maths professor at City said that it would be "too broad a statement" to say that the results showed better teaching quality at City than at Oxford, and that City perhaps "looked after the students very well", whereas Oxford maybe did not demonstrate this ability as well as it might have.
9th Nov 2000