Tuning India Results Survey on Students’ Workload

Tuning India Results Survey on Students’ Workload

STUDENTS’ WORKLOAD: SURVEY ANALYSIS

In order to estimate adequately the workload required for students to achieve the learning outcomes specified in the curriculum, special survey on students’ workload at Indian universities has been conducted. The process included the involvement of academics and students as the key groups of the survey. The survey aims at approximating the real volume of work hours needed by a student to pass the unit/course/module from the point of view of teachers’ planning and perception and students’ opinion. This helps to improve the degree programmes designed.

Data Editing, Cleaning & Checking and Consistency

The raw database went through the standard process of editing, cleaning and checking for extreme, invalid or inconsistent values. Given the nature of the survey, where individuals were asked to give rough estimates referred to the number of hours devoted to different academic activities within different time periods (semester, week), some inconsistencies and errors were to be expected. At the same time, and as it happens in many surveys, some questions were left unanswered sometimes or individuals assigned values which could be considered as inconsistent.

The process of data checking/cleaning was performed on each of the variables separately. Careful analysis was carried out observing the distribution of different variables to decide what could be considered as inconsistent within each variable based on the analysis of outliers. As it could be expected, the number of outliers was higher among students than among academics.

Calculating Results

Results are displayed according to the four different areas divided into academics and students. The methodology implies that in order to include a given academic institution in the final results, at least one value was requested for all courses constituting one given semester.