"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" How well do the individual questions within the National Student Survey explain overall satisfaction?

The National Student Survey is an annual survey of all final year undergraduate students, asking questions about their undergraduate study ranging across 8 dimensions, including “Teaching on my course”, “Assessment and Feedback”, “Academic Support”, “Organisation and Management”, “Learning Resources”, “Learning Community” and “Student Voice”.

We use within-university variation across the subjects of Economics, Physics and Medicine to estimate firstly the relationships between response rates and overall satisfaction, and secondly the relationship between overall satisfaction and the individual component questions.

Our results are in line with previous literature in this area and suggest that the key determinants of overall student satisfaction are perceptions of “Teaching on my course”, and “Organisation and Management”, whilst the role that “Assessment and Feedback” plays is uncertain, with negative results found (since 2017) for both Economics and Physics. We also find significant heterogeneity relating to the sensitivity on individual questions, such as the ability to contact staff when needed, which is a positive predictor of overall satisfaction in medicine, but not in Economics or Physics.

Whilst response rate is strongly correlated with overall satisfaction both overall, and within University, this effect is purely predictive and not causal. We show that, for Economics, response rate is particularly predicted by organisation and management, and is negatively related with satisfaction in assessment and feedback.