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From Wikileaks

ALEXI MOSTROUS (Times Online)
Tuesday May 12, 2008

Students at Kingston University were instructed to exaggerate as “that’s what everyone else is doing".

Listen to the recording

The reputation of a crucial Government-backed league table was undermined today after staff at a London university were caught telling students to be dishonest in order to boost their college’s rankings.

Two lecturers were secretly recorded urging undergraduates to give Kingston University a glowing report in the National Student Survey (NSS), which measures how satisfied students are with their courses.

One lecturer told more than 100 students that their degrees would be “shit” unless Kingston, in south-west London, did well.

The other member of staff said the survey, run by the Government funding council, was no place for students to vent “garbage” about how they disliked their courses.

The university said the recording was authentic and expressed regret for the “inappropriate comments”.

In the recording, one staff member is heard telling the group of final year psychology students: “The results of this survey get fed...into league tables.

“The league tables are what prospective employers and graduate courses use to assess the value of your degree," she said.

“If Kingston comes down the bottom, no-one's going to want to employ you because they're going to think your degree is shit, all right?"

The lecturer also told her students they were competing with “lots of other students who also want their degree to look good.”

“Although this is going to sound incredibly biased,” she said, “if you think something’s a four, my encouragement would be to give it a five. Because that’s what everyone else is doing.”

A second staff member urged students to use internal university feedback forms for “all that garbage you’re spewing out about us”.

“But that is not the place of National Student Survey to do so,” he said.

His colleague jokingly agreed, saying: “If you hate Fred's course, tell Fred."

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which publishes the National Student Survey, told Times Online it was aware of the incident and took it “very seriously”.

Kingston Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Scott said: “We believe this to be an isolated incident and regret the inappropriate comments made to students about the National Student Survey, even if these remarks were not intended to be taken entirely literally.

“As soon as we were alerted to this allegation we investigated the matter and looked at ways to ensure that such a mistake was not repeated.

“We have kept HEFCE fully informed about our investigation.

The NSS was commissioned by HEFCE in 2005 and asks final year students 22 questions about their course. The results are incorporated into the main university league tables, including The Times’ Good University Guide.

Originally published at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3924417.ece