Dr. Greg Foley:

It has got much more bureaucratic. There is huge input from students nowadays. However, regarding the idea of tracking them through their careers, people get wiser as they get older and they look back on their education with slightly different eyes and maybe appreciate it more. We certainly find that when most of our graduates come back to us they are very complimentary. Sometimes, in the thick of things - when a student has not done well in an exam, for example - it is not necessarily the best time to ask him or her. There is a lot of literature on this. If one considers how valuable student surveys of teaching are, for example, they are very often popularity contests and are not really objective assessments of quality of learning. In fact, a very recent study produced in Italy showed that ratings in student surveys were inversely proportional to the amount the students learned. What I have found over the years is that students love a teacher who makes life easy for them. If a teacher is very organised, provides students with absolutely everything they need and minimises the need to go to the library and do extra work, they will think the teacher is great. That is why I like the idea of tracking students over a decade or more.