Providing feedback and knowing what impact it can have is an important part of your university experience. We collect your feedback in various ways during your time at King’s: through surveys, module evaluations, through your student representatives, the King’s 100, focus groups, working groups, and through our colleagues in KCLSU, who each year run a range of campaigns to support your academic, social, professional and wellbeing interests.
Two of the largest feedback surveys we have at King’s are the National Student Survey (NSS) for undergraduates and Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES). These are open to students in the final year of their course and are an important way to help us understand what we should be doing more, what is going well and where we can improve our students' experience in departments and at King’s more generally.
This year, 5,301 final year undergraduate students completed the NSS, and 3,490 final year postgraduate taught students completed PTES - response rates of 78% and 28%, respectively. This year's results of both these surveys show that while our students’ experience of teaching and learning, and learning resources has been very good with scores of over 80%, it’s been less so for our assessment and feedback, and organisation and management, where scores are under 80%.
This is consistent with what our students have told us in previous surveys and we’ve already begun work on improving these areas. This has led to stable or improved feedback scores in assessment and feedback, organisation and management, and wellbeing support compared to last year.
How your feedback makes an impact
Here are some recent examples of how we've acted on the feedback we receive through surveys like NSS and PTES:
You told us we could reduce pressure and enhance wellbeing around assessment and that the Mitigating Circumstances Process could be improved. In response, we revised our late submission regulation so you are not automatically capped at the pass mark if submitting coursework after the deadline, and our Mitigating Circumstances Process, making evidence requirements clearer and more proportionate.
After you told us you wanted to access course and campus information in an easier way, we updated the functionality of our timetables so you could import them into your personal calendar and access them more quickly. We’ve also increased the number of Knowledge Articles on Student Services Online, which has its own search engine and chatbot to help answer common questions and in 2022 we launched our Student App to give you more information at your fingertips.
We created our Student Wellbeing Team to offer support and activities for your wellbeing, and we’ve lowered waiting times for first appointments and introduced greater flexibility into our counselling service.
For more examples, read our earlier article on Using student feedback to improve your experience.
We want to thank everyone who has given feedback during their time at King’s so far and made their voices heard. Whether it’s completing the NSS or PTES, your module evaluations or letting your student representatives know your experience, we hope you will continue to share, so we can continue to make improvements and make your time at King’s even better.