Assessing subjective university success with the Subjective Academic Achievement Scale (SAAS)

University achievement is a highly relevant educational outcome with implications for students' academic and professional futures. As the majority of students that drop out of university do so due to subjective reasons in contrast to a lack of capability to handle the workload, a measure of subjective university achievement (complementing grade point average) is helpful to enhance educational research on causes, correlates, and consequences of university success. This study aims to introduce a short scale for assessing subjective academic achievement – the SAAS – and provide first results on its psychometric properties. Based on two independent samples of university students, the internal consistency, factorial validity, and construct validity of the SAAS are corroborated, suggesting the measure's administration in educational research on university success and related issues.

Mis-Measuring Our Universities: Why Global University Rankings Don’t Add Up

Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of global university rankings to evaluate university success. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, this perspective argues that the pursuit of growth as measured by such indicators creates universities that ‘grow’ up the rankings rather than those which ‘thrive’ or ‘mature.’ Such growth creates academic wealth divides within and between countries, despite the direction of growth as inspired by the rankings not truly reflecting universities’ critical purpose or contribution. Highlights the incompatibility between universities’ alignment with socially responsible practices and continued engagement with socially irresponsible ranking practices. Proposes four possible ways of engendering change in the university rankings space. Concludes by calling on leaders of ‘world-leading’ universities to join together to ‘lead the world’ in challenging global university rankings, and to set their own standards for thriving and maturing universities.

Enhancing Intensive English Program Reading and Writing Courses through Integrated-Skill Activities

In an increasingly competitive global Intensive English Programs (IEPs) environment (Benshoff, 2018), developing courses that efficiently meet student needs and equip students with skills essential for university success is paramount. Many IEPs develop reading and writing (RW) courses around one textbook for reading and another for writing, essentially separating RW skills from listening and speaking skills (Oxford, 2001). However, our university foundation-year program has started to integrate listening and speaking skills with instruction and assessment into RW courses. Instructors have observed what appear to be increased gains in learning when students pre-read, read, discuss, listen to related lectures, present, and then write about academic topics. Students’ writing reveals greater voice as they seem to understand topics more deeply and have developed greater fluency with ideas and terminology and an increased ability to paraphrase, summarize, and synthesize, aligning with findings in related literature (e.g., Horowitz, 1986). This integrated-skill approach also more closely resembles university tasks than the segregated-skill approach does. This article explains the integrated-skill approach, examines its impact on revitalizing IEP RW instruction, and showcases some sample activities. Keywordsreading and writing (RW), extensive reading, integrated-skill approach (ISA), student success, Intensive English Programs (IEPs)

Mis-measuring our universities: how global university rankings don't add up

Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of global university rankings to evaluate university success. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, this perspective argues that the pursuit of growth as measured by such indicators creates universities that ‘grow’ up the rankings rather than those which ‘thrive’ or ‘mature’. Such growth creates academic wealth divides within and between countries, despite the direction of growth as inspired by the rankings not truly reflecting universities’ critical purpose or contribution. Highlights the incompatibility between universities’ alignment with socially responsible practices and continued engagement with socially irresponsible ranking practices. Proposes four possible ways of engendering change in the university rankings space. Concludes by calling on leaders of ‘world-leading’ universities to join together to ‘lead the world’ in challenging global university rankings, and to set their own standards for thriving and maturing universities.

Partnership as Student Power: Democracy and Governance in a Neoliberal University

In the wake of Flinders University’s radical organisational restructure, we reflect on what guided the decisions and process, namely a neoliberal understanding and framing of higher education and corporal, top-down managerial systems. We explore this current climate of the neoliberal university and argue that student power is once again needed to shift the conception of university ‘success’ back into a democratic form of governance. However, rather than student power constituting of a traditional 1970s form of picketing protests, we argue that a model of working within current structures is prudent. Partnership with students initiatives provide unexpected hope for student participation in rebuilding the conception of the democratic university as a public good, but also highlight the relevance of student ‘activism’ in 2019.

Performance Evaluation Criteria Development Process for Academic Staff at Universities

Lecturer performance is an important factor on the university success. Based on this, universities are using different criterion to assess and improve lecturer performance. The current study aims to explain some of the important HRM practices on the lecturer performance. The second aim of the paper is to determine the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to evaluate lecturer performance. As result, we have developed the performance criteria to be evaluated periodically by departmental managers. The paper provides a detailed understanding of how AHP works and is useful to measure the performance at educational institutions to reward the high achieving lecturers. The model contains a robust methodology that might change from a university to another. Therefore, with this methodology, the criteria in a new setting might be reevaluated and the importance of each criterion can be recalculated.

How Is It Different From Conventional Learning?

In the current Indonesian business scene, corporate universities have become fashionable. Since their first emergence in the 2010s, Indonesian corporate universities have shown that they are more than just dressed-up learning centers operating under a new name. As prominent organizations in Indonesia start to build their own learning initiatives adopting the model of the corporate university, success stories of the new approach radiate. Bringing an example of a developing country of Indonesia, this chapter attempts to discuss the trends, challenges, and practices of corporate university. This chapter also examines best practices from Indonesian corporate universities and how they differ from the conventional university and their learning techniques differ from traditional learning methods.