1.
Introduction
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This report explores the extent and nature of influences on university mean scores for the Course Experience Questionnaire scales. The Course Experience Questionnaire is sent to graduates of nearly all Australian universities some six months after completion of their course. The questionnaire asks graduates for their views on aspects of their course which relate to teaching, assessment, workload, skill formation and overall satisfaction with their course.
Some variation in scores may be intrinsic to the nature of the course—for instance the content of the material being taught and the level of the course—whether it is undergraduate or postgraduate. It has been found that mean scores vary substantially between fields of study (e.g. architecture, law, medicine) and across levels of course (e.g. degree, Masters, PhD) (Ainley and Long 1994). Hence any comparisons between universities of means of the Course Experience Questionnaire scales should be restricted to comparisons within a particular field of study for a given level of course—for example, to comparisons between the mean scores for universities for graduates of degree-level accounting courses.
Within a particular field of study and for a given level of course, there is often substantial variation between the scale means of the different universities. Meaningful comparison of such university means requires that the means reflect differences in the quality of teaching, assessment, workload, skill formation and overall satisfaction with the course. This is the intrinsic variation central to the whole undertaking.
Some of the variation between Course Experience Questionnaire scale scores may be due to extrinsic influences—that is, influences which are not related to the nature of the courses themselves, but rather to characteristics of the graduates of the courses or to the nature of the methodology of the data collection.
Information on possible extraneous influences is drawn from several sources.
Extrinsic sources of variation in scale scores due to graduate characteristics may be of interest in themselves. If females are less satisfied with their university courses overall, this could be a matter for further investigation. If part-time students are more likely to perceive workloads as excessive, this may have implications for provision for part-time students.
The existence of extrinsic sources of variation in Course Experience Questionnaire scales is one issue which is addressed in this report. It is another matter altogether as to whether any extrinsic influences which do exist affect university means and the interpretations which can be made of these means. In so far as it is possible, this further issue is investigated.
The next chapter provides information about the Graduate Destination Survey and the Course Experience Questionnaire scales. The third chapter examines the relationships between graduate background characteristics (age, sex, mode of attendance and employment status) and scale scores and the effect of those relationships on university means for degree and honours graduates for selected fields of study. The fourth chapter extends this examination to aggregated data drawn from DEETYA. The final chapter presents the analyses in a somewhat different format, and summarises the findings of the investigation.