The Open University has been rated the best in the UK by the folks who know - the final year students.
Whereas that is extremely gratifying for those of us who work for that auspicious institution, we need to be careful about getting carried away with narrow measures of the performance of complex systems.
Brenda Gourley, the vice-chancellor of the Open University, said she was delighted with the outcome of the survey but :
"Listening to what students have to say is very important. But on the wider point you have got to be very careful not to find yourself trapped in some kind of crass consumerism culture.
I do worry about popularity parades and celebrity professors creeping into the higher education system in a way which doesn't value scholarly rigour."
Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick boycotted the survey but lest you think "Ah... they would have come out on top," just remember that the OU has out-performed all of those prestigious institutions in a range of subject areas (not least my own Technology Faculty, which received a maximum score of 24 out of 24 in recent years) in quality assessment audits carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council.
Caveats of simplistic measurements in mind, it is still nice to be able to bask in plaudits once in a while!
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