Introduction
A team of auditors from the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) visited the University of Huddersfield (the University) from 6 to 10 December 2004 to carry out an institutional audit. The purpose of the audit was to provide public information on the quality of the opportunities available to students and on the academic standards of the University's awards.
To arrive at its conclusions the audit team spoke to members of staff throughout the University, to current students, and read a wide range of documents relating to the way the University manages the academic aspects of its provision.
The words 'academic standards' are used to describe the level of achievement that a student has to reach to gain an award (for example, a degree). It should be at a similar level across the UK.
Academic quality is a way of describing how well the learning opportunities available to students help them to achieve their award. It is about making sure that appropriate teaching, support, assessment and learning opportunities are provided for them.
In institutional audit, both academic standards and academic quality are reviewed.
Provision offered by its partners which leads to the University's awards will be the subject of a separate collaborative provision audit at a later date.
Outcome of the audit
As a result of its investigations, the audit team's view of the University is that:
- there can be broad confidence in the soundness of the University's current and likely future management of the quality of its academic programmes and the academic standards of its awards.
Features of good practice
The audit team identified the following areas as being good practice:
the steps taken by the University to support its students, including its arrangements for their induction including the diagnostic tests and study skills support it provides for them and the work of its academic skills tutors; its personal tutorial arrangements; the attention it continues to pay to ascertaining and meeting the needs of its students in designing and implementing its teaching, learning and assessment arrangements; the clear focus on the needs of students which its Student Services have adopted; and the supervision and personal and general support arrangements it has implemented for its research students
- the use it makes of its Applicant and Student Information System (ASIS) at the level of the individual student and to analyse patterns and trends in progression and completion in some areas
- the robustness and apparent effectiveness of the design it has adopted for annual evaluation, and the design of its arrangements for responding to external examiners' reports and communicating to them the actions it has taken
- its arrangements for thematic reviews and services reviews, which enable it to monitor matters of cross-institutional relevance and inform their development
- the ways in which links between formative and summative assessments have been made in some areas
- its draft e-learning strategy, which maps on to the e-learning framework developed by the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Recommendations for action
The audit team advises the University to:
- define more closely for its schools and award boards the criteria they are to follow when deciding how to use the discretion it allows them in its degree classification arrangements, and ask its Teaching and Learning Committee to monitor how schools and award boards use such discretion
- bring its programme which leads to the professional examinations of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants fully into its own annual and periodic arrangements for monitoring and review, and satisfy itself that all other such provision falls fully within its own quality assurance arrangements
- consider how its present process for the confirmation of module marks by pathway assessment boards might be developed, to allow the boards to review the marks for a range of subject modules when appropriate and, what formal reporting arrangements might be required to ensure that any changes arising from such a review of marks could be transparently recorded.
It would also be desirable for the University to:
- design and implement policies which will lead to a more active approach to identifying, disseminating and embedding good practice
- build on the observations it offered in its self-evaluation document and develop its quality assurance arrangements for e-learning
- develop its strategic understanding of how ASIS might be used to its full advantage in quality and academic standards management including cohort analysis
- keep under review the effectiveness of its new system for student evaluation of pathways, in order to ensure that the richness of module-level information which its predecessor generated is not lost
- take steps throughout its assessment processes to ensure that the fact that the moderation of marking and marks has taken place is reliably recorded
- clarify its regulations to ensure that its requirements with respect to the participation of external peers in all validations and approvals is unambiguously stated.
Outcomes of discipline audit trails
In the course of the audit, programmes of study leading to academic awards in Accountancy, Business Studies, Chemistry, Music, and Psychology were scrutinised. In each case the audit found that the standard of student achievement in the programmes was appropriate to the titles of the relevant awards and their location within The framework for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and that the quality of learning opportunities available to students was suitable for programmes of study leading to those awards.
National reference points
To provide further evidence to support its findings the audit team also investigated the use made by the University of the Academic Infrastructure which QAA has developed on behalf of the whole of UK higher education. The Academic Infrastructure is a set of nationally agreed reference points that help to define both good practice and academic standards. The findings of the audit suggest that the University's response to all aspects of the Academic Infrastructure has been timely and appropriate.
From 2005, the published information set will include the recommended summaries of external examiners' reports and of feedback from current students for each programme. The evidence provided for the audit shows that the University has taken the necessary steps to be able to meet the requirements of the Higher Education Funding Council for England's document 03/51, Information on quality and standards in higher education: Final guidance.
>> Main report
>> Findings
ISBN 1 84482 249 4
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