Get the full results of the Times Higher Education?Student Experience Survey 2018

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Overall score

Academic experience

Security

Student welfare

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Accommodation

Societal experience

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Industry connections

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Figuring it out: the methodology behind the results

This year, the annual results are based on the responses of 20,251 undergraduates, who were asked to describe how their university contributed to a positive or negative experience on a seven-point scale, from ¡°strongly agree¡± to ¡°strongly disagree¡±. Questions have remained unchanged since 2005 to allow comparisons across years.

Data are collected from October to June from full-time, UK-based undergraduates. There is a one-year time lag between collection and publication.?

The survey is linked to YouthSight¡¯s student omnibus surveys and respondents can participate once a year. Only full-time undergraduate members of YouthSight¡¯s 140,000-strong opinion panel community can take part.

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For each measure, a mean ¡°agreement score¡± is created per institution. Each score for the 21 formulated measures is then weighted depending on how strongly it correlates with the 22nd ¡°measure¡± recommendation.?

For each institution, the sum of the weighted mean scores is divided by the sum of the weights to calculate a weighted average mean. This is then indexed to provide an overall score (out of 100).?

A selection of composite scores have been created to allow institutions to see how they are performing in different areas of student experience.?

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As the number of responses per institution broadly reflects institution size, it is not always possible to achieve a large enough sample to provide statistically robust data at all institutions. The compromise is to set a minimum threshold of 50 responses per institution before inclusion. In total, 116 institutions were included, with an average sample size of 175.

As with any survey, there is an ¡°error bar¡± linked to each institution¡¯s sample size and variance. On average, for the SES, a difference of 3.7 points in the overall score is required to produce a significant difference between institutions. So, at the top and bottom of the rankings, institutions have to move only a few places to see a significant difference, but in the middle, where scores are bunched together, rankings need to shift by 30-40 places to see a significant difference.

For the first time this year, three-year rolling average data have been published, which aggregate results for a period of three consecutive years, starting with the years 2009 to 2011.?

This allows for a very large sample, which reduces the impact of sampling errors in any one given year. The next time period adds one year and loses one year ¨C for example, the period 2009-11 is followed by 2010-12, and so on. In this way, we are able to show the long-term trends at the level of individual higher -education institutions and the overall sector. ?

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We have supplied a rolling three-year -verage for the overall scores, for the composite scores and for each individual measure. Only institutions that achieve at least 150 interviews across a three-year rolling period have been included in calculations.?

Ashleigh Gillan?
Research manager
YouthSight