Proposals to rate the quality of UK university courses according to the seniority of lecturers have been branded ¡°absurd¡± and ¡°unfair to early career scholars¡±.

As part of a??on the planned subject-level version of the teaching excellence framework, the Department for Education has outlined six options for a new ¡°teaching intensity¡± metric that could influence whether a degree is given a gold, silver or bronze award.

One of the options is to use gross teaching quotient, which measures students¡¯ contact hours, weighted by class size ¨C thereby rewarding small-group teaching ¨C as?outlined in a specification issued last year.

However, the consultation document also details five other options for measuring teaching intensity, including the creation of a GTQ metric that ¡°would also weight contact time by qualification/seniority of the teacher¡±.

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¡°The qualification and seniority of the teacher could be seen as proxies for the quality of the teaching,¡± says the consultation, although it acknowledges that there is ¡°no consensus on what [measures] would be a good proxy for ¡®good teacher¡¯¡±, such as whether they have a PhD or a teaching qualification, or how many years of industry experience they have.

Cathy Shrank, professor of Tudor and Renaissance literature at the?University of Sheffield, said that the proposed metric was ¡°clearly ridiculous¡±, adding that ¡°the idea that seniority of staff can be equated with teaching quality is also so unfair to early career scholars, including PhD students, who put so much into their teaching¡±.

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Other options for measuring teaching intensity include surveying students about their ¡°perception¡± of how many contact hours they received, or about how much independent study they undertook. Another idea is to measure ¡°engagement with teaching resources¡± which would draw on data including ¡°use of libraries and digital resources, completion of assignments and other matters¡±, although the consultation admits that collecting these data might be ¡°very intrusive¡±.

Michael Merrifield, professor of astronomy at the University of Nottingham, said that the idea of ¡°GTQ as formulated [would create] an absurd measure¡±, with the staff-to-student ratio rating system containing ¡°cliff edges which would mean that very similar programmes will get arbitrarily different levels of recognition¡±.

¡°It also fails to recognise many of the aspects of teaching that are most important to students, such as high-quality assessment, feedback and open-door access to lecturers,¡± adding that ¡°creating a system that incentivises universities to cut corners on all these more personalised aspects of education is perverse in the extreme¡±.

Paul Ashwin, professor of higher education at?Lancaster University, said that all the new options outlined in the consultation would be ¡°very strange ways to measure teaching quality¡±.

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¡°Option one for the GTQ [as described last year] looks a bit odd, but the others are so strangely presented that they start to make it look quite good,¡± he said.

Professor Ashwin added that plans to measure teaching intensity ¡°start from the idea that more is better, rather than understanding that high-quality courses need to be well-designed to balance many different things¡±.

However, the ¡°strangest thing¡± about these plans was that they were announced midway through the first year-long pilot exercise for the subject-level TEF, which will conclude in summer 2018, said Professor Ashwin.

¡°While it lays out lots of options, the whole tone of the consultation is ¡®we don¡¯t know what we should do¡¯ when they could have just waited six months for the results of the pilot,¡± he said, adding that if the consultation¡¯s unusual ideas ¡°were not so worrying, they would be quite amusing¡±.

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Professor Ashwin also predicted that the idea for a ¡°bottom-up¡± subject-level TEF, in which all subjects were assessed, would be prohibitively expensive, and that a ¡°by-exception¡± model, in which discipline-level assessments would differ from a provider-level award only if there were significant deviation, would be preferred.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com