News
September 25, 2006
The Australian "gets it wrong" on CSU Journalism course satisfaction
In The Australian newspaper’s Media supplement on September 21, a story and supposed league table ranked CSU Journalism as having the second lowest “satisfaction” rating among all journalism courses. It claimed that satisfaction amongst CSU journalism graduates about their course was only of 50%.
The story is both wrong and was not checked with the University or relevant staff, says Associate Professor Tom Watson, Head of the School of Communication .
“The satisfaction rating is actually 78% for 2005, based on a 71% response rate from more than 50 graduates,” he said.
Associate Professor Tom Watson has written to Martin Beesley, the editor of Media supplement and set out the facts. A correction has been sought.
“The Australian got its story wrong. Instead of being one of the lowest ranked journalism courses, CSU should be one of the highest and more than 10% above the average “satisfaction” ranking of university journalism courses,” he said.
“At a time when many secondary students are making choices about university courses, this error could lead to incorrectly-informed decisions being made. I can assure potential students and their parents that the satisfaction of CSU graduates is very high, the reputation of the course in the media industry is very high and the level of graduate employment in journalism is very high.
NOTE: There can be no “league table of university journalism schools” based on the Graduate Careers Council of Australia (GCCA) data for these reasons:
- This data is collected in a survey of students called the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) and is supplied to GCCA in a consolidated form, not by individual courses. It is available at this website, http://www.avcc.edu.au/content.asp?page=/policies_programs/graduates/ceq2005.htm
- The Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) makes publicly available CEQ results for individual institutions, by course level and Field of Education. It is possible to obtain general data on individual universities, but there is nothing specific on any individual course, such as Journalism.
- In more detail: out of 52 journalism graduates, CSU received 37 survey responses – a response rate of 71%. On the course satisfaction question: 14 Strongly Satisfied; 15 Satisfied; 6 Neutral; 2 Disagree. Obviously this does not support The Australian article in saying that 50% of our Journalism students responded saying they were “very dissatisfied, dissatisfied or neutral”.
