University of Divinity #1 in Australia for overall student experience

The University of Divinity has once again been voted by students as having the highest quality overall educational experience of any university in Australia.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Sherlock, said

The University of Divinity’s results in the 2022 Student Experience Survey are absolutely outstanding and testify to our ability over many years to deliver the best student experience of any University in Australia.

These results are attributable to the quality of teaching provided by our dedicated staff, our commitment to small class sizes in which every student is known by name, and the effectiveness of our engagement with church and agency partners that enables us to  provide students with the educational outcomes they need to flourish in a variety of professions, vocations and ministries.”

The annual Student Experience Survey (SES) took place over August to October 2022. The SES is part of the Federal Government’s Quality Indicator of Learning and Teaching (QILT) program and provides a national architecture for collecting data on key aspects of the higher education student experience (qilt.edu.au).

The University of Divinity has seen a significant increase in ratings from 2021 to 2022, returning to claim the ‘top spot’ in ratings of the overall quality of educational experience for universities, which it also achieved in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In 2022, University of Divinity students reported particularly high satisfaction in the key areas of Learning Resources (90.6, 92.0), Student Support (89.9, 89.0) and Teaching Quality (88.9, 88.3).

The University of Divinity’s response rate was 47.8% of students, well above the national average response rate of 37.0%.

Nationally, student experience has continued to improve in 2022, recovering to pre-pandemic levels overall in the focus areas of Skills Development, Teaching Quality, and Learning Resources, while Learner Engagement and Student Support are yet to fully recover.

Figure 1: Quality of entire educational experience (2022, with 90% confidence intervals) among undergraduates from universities by institution.

Figure 2: Quality of entire educational experience (2022, with 90% confidence intervals) among postgraduate coursework students from universities by institution.