NSS results reveal downward trend in student satisfaction across most College departments

Imperial is below the national average in three themes in the National Student Survey (NSS), according to this year’s results. It placed in the bottom quartile in “Assessment and Feedback”, with 11 of 17 departments under the 25th percentile of all British providers for their respective subjects.

The College, which ranked second in the QS World University Rankings 2025, experienced a fall in overall positivity scores across all themes but one from 2023 – most notably in “Student Voice”, where as many as eight departments saw a decrease of at least five percentage points (pp).

“Assessment and Feedback” is a problem across nearly every department this year: only Chemical Engineering and Medicine placed in the top quartile, while Physics and Bioengineering are the worst ranked departments within their own subjects. Civil & Environmental Engineering and Design Engineering experienced sharp drops in the category by 18 pp and 14 pp respectively. Imperial is ranked, as an institution, in the bottom quartile nationally, with an Assessment and Feedback score of 67.3%.

Imperial’s Physics department is ranked the second worst in the country, despite moderate improvements in “Assessment and Feedback” and “Organisation and Management”.

Physics’ performance, however, mirrors that of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, especially the Department of Life Sciences. Biochemistry ranks in the bottom quartile among 47 providers of Molecular Biology, Biophysics, and Biochemistry for all themes except “Learning Resources”, placing 45th in “Teaching on my course”, “Assessment and Feedback”, “Organisation and Management”, and “Student Voice”. Biological Sciences received similarly unfavourable results, including the position of being the lowest ranked UK department in “Student Voice” following a plummet of 19 pp from 2023.

Similar trends can be observed in the Faculty of Engineering. Civil Engineering experienced a significant drop in virtually all themes: as well as “Assessment and Feedback” the department fell in “Student Voice” by almost 20 pp, two themes that did not rank highly in the previous year’s survey.

The percentage of good degrees, the proportion of both first class and upper second class (2.1) degrees awarded, across also partially reflects the state of each department. While this generally doesn’t correlate with the average positivity score, there is some indication of departments which might be underperforming compared to the rest of the College. Physics has stayed at least one standard deviation under the College mean percentage from 2017 to 2023 and fell to 79% – some 14 pp below that year’s mean – in 2022, coinciding with its lowest overall satisfaction positivity in the same period.

Others fared better. Chemical Engineering is number one ranked among similar departments in Russell Group universities across five themes; Medicine topped London providers after significant improvements in all categories, including a 12 pp increase in the “Student Voice”. Imperial College School of Medicine Students’ Union also received the highest satisfaction score among all UK Medicine departments in how well it “represents students’ academic interests”.

The overall satisfaction question has not been asked to students in English providers since last year as part of an upheaval of the survey questions after the 2022 edition, though it continues to be given to providers in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. A question on the freedom of expression was added in its place, for English institutions only.

In a consultation in October that year, the Office for Students (OfS), the regulatory body for higher education in the UK, and which manages the NSS, explained that the higher specificity of the rest of the questions is “important for our approach to the regulation of [the] quality” of higher education providers, remarking that the overall satisfaction question “does not contribute to our understanding of the aspects of quality that are within the scope of” the standards set for providers by the OfS.