کدام ویژگی های دانشکده کسب و کار با رتبه بندی بررسی دانشجویان ملی مطلوب تر همبستگی دارد؟  What business school characteristics are correlated with more favourable National Student Survey (NSS)  rankings?

1. Introduction A rise or fall in league tables can have significant consequences for a tertiary institution. As a result, understanding those higher education institution characteristics that are significantly correlated with higher scores on the National Student Survey (NSS) becomes increasingly important. This is due in part to the emergence of rankings using NSS data constructed by third parties such as media outlets, which shine a spotlight on student satisfaction levels. The ‘University League Table’ as produced by the Guardian is one such ranking (with the Times Higher Education World University Rankings being another with a teaching component) which directly uses student satisfaction levels from the NSS as components in determining their ‘Guardian Score out of 100’ which they use to rank universities in the UK. Additional university rankings in the UK include ‘The Complete University Guide’ compiled by Mayfield University Consultants, and ‘The Good University Guide’ published by The Times/The Sunday Times. All three of these rankings use NSS results as inputs into their final rankings. In addition, the NSS results are displayed in a form suitable for potential students on the Unistats website. It is also not an uncommon sight to see student satisfaction levels for a particular institution reported on their website, or even on the backs of buses. The traditionally admired universities, arguably, have little need for marketing. A national awareness that they have produced many of the country’s most renowned scholars for centuries- and later employed them e is proof enough that an education at such a place is expected to be worthwhile. However, other universities, particularly those who comprise the group known as the United Kingdom’s ‘new universities’, that have evolved since 1992, are more reliant on positive promotion in order to be able to compete for students. Therefore, the benefits of being favourably ranked on the NSS (22 questions answered by final year undergraduates) can be significant. Recent discussions in the UK around a framework to recognise the highest quality teaching have coincided with attempts to create a “nuanced benchmarking system” (Canning, 2015 p. 56), including the construction of a raw weighted student satisfaction score (WSSS) and a normalised weighted student satisfaction quotient (WSSQ). The calculation of the WSSS and standardising of the WSSQ can be found in the appendix of Canning’s paper, however a brief summary is given below: “The main components of the model are the proportion (min, 0, max 1) who agreed or strongly agreed with each of the questions for a particular course, a weight for each of the questions (derived from Marsh and Cheng’s (2008) factor analysis) and an adjustment for overall subject differences. This overall score is then multiplied by 100 to avoid the overuse of decimal places. This calculation has been performed for all 4128 courses which appeared in the National Student Survey (2014). The resulting WSSS scores are then standardised to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. An average course will score 100” (Canning, 2016). The objective of Canning’s work is to allow courses to be ranked on absolute and relative performance, hopefully leading to a “more considered use of NSS data” (Canning, 2015 p. 56). This paper attempts to contribute to the current discussion by asking the research question ‘what are the important higher education institution characteristics that are significantly correlated with higher scores and rankings on the NSS in business related subjects?’ The recent work of Canning (2015) is also examined. Business related subjects were chosen as the focus as they are a readily identifiable subset of subjects clustered within most universities. The research outlined below suggests the biggest differences in NSS satisfaction ratings found is at the course level within universities. This makes a comparison of a specific subset of subjects between universities more appealing.