Evaluating taught postgraduate awards from the student’s perspective

There is a need for a questionnaire designed specifically to evaluate taught postgraduate (TPg) awards for quality assurance or enhancement purposes. Comparison of undergraduate and TPg awards suggests that as the former have broadened their ambit to better nurture generic graduate attributes, TPg awards have concentrated on advanced specialised knowledge and skills. Those enrolling in TPg programmes are often mature part-time students working in a field associated with the subject studied. A set of interviews with TPg students revealed that they had clear expectations of the knowledge and skills they were expected to acquire from their studies and were able to comment critically on curriculum design. This made it clear that instruments designed for undergraduate degrees would not be suitable. Therefore, a TPg questionnaire was designed based on a model derived from a qualitative study, which adopted a grounded theory approach to collect views from 21 part-time TPg students from seven programmes offered by six institutions in Hong Kong. The conceptual model underpinning the questionnaire design was tested using structural equation modelling. As the results showed a good fit to the data, the validity of the questionnaire was confirmed. Use of the instrument in a routine quality assurance exercise across a university revealed that results from the questionnaire were highly diagnostic, so providing constructive feedback for curriculum reform.