Abstract
In the UK, the annual National Student Survey (NSS) has embedded itself in the country’s higher education sector as a reality check to the state of concomitant undergraduate student learning experience (SLE). Its impact grows year on year, with universities comparing themselves against each other on their respective NSS scores, as well as prospective students using these results to evidence their potential university choice. The SLE themes included in the NSS are; teaching on my course, learning opportunities, assessment and feedback, academic support, operations and management and learning resource. This study offers a novel set of ranking analyses of ‘Accounting’ courses in UK universities based on their NSS theme positivity scores, using the Classification and Ranking Belief Simplex (CaRBS) technique, demonstrating an uncertain reasoning approach in this case (along with SMARTER based benchmark ranking results). The CaRBS analyses use slightly different versions of the data, firstly a direct ranking of the courses based on theme positivity scores, and secondly a further ranking which includes the impact of the level of non-participation of students on the individual courses (specific themes) levels of responses. This non-participation beings levels of uncertainty in the ranking positions of the considered ‘Accounting’ courses. Through the combination of theme based evidence in the CaRBS approach, final rank positions are premised based on separate levels of belief and plausibility in rank positions. With emphasis on the visualisation of results, the findings clearly demonstrate how uncertainty/ignorance (here levels of non-participation) in NSS evidence may have an impact on the perceived ranking results and should certainly not be considered an irrelevance.