Students' Feedback System and Credibility of Teaching Learning Process: Complementary or Contradictory

“The Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (MDGs, 2002) consider knowledge as the prime mover of development in the new millennium. How to provide quality education to large numbers at affordable cost is the primary concern of developing countries. In this context quality and excellence should be the vision of every higher education institution.”

Quality has become the defining element of education in the 21st Century in the context of new social realities. Focusing quality has been a major concern in business and industry for a long time. Recently, the need of ensuring quality in educational institutions has been accepted by all the academicians, scholars and policy makers. Efforts are being made to set and provide high quality standards for dissemination of quality education. In India, set up of National Assessment & Accreditation Council has been proved as a milestone in this tedious job. This national agency is acting hard and facilitating higher education institutions to understand and implement the concept of quality in education. Addressing the higher education providers, NAAC states.

Further in this context, researchers are in favor of considering ‘education’ as a separate service quality which can be measured with special TQM tools like SERVQUAL where customers typically assess service quality by comparing the service they have actually experienced (the perceived service quality) with the service they desire or expect (their expected service quality). However, service quality in higher education is a relative concept with respect to the stakeholders in higher education and circumstances in which it is involved. Therefore, measuring service quality in education and identifying the gap is a novel approach being introduced and implemented in education sector. In every higher education institution, such gap is measured with the help of students’ feedback system. Although it is a highly recommended method by NAAC for ensuring quality in teaching and learning process, effectiveness and impact of this tool is still a question of debate. So a data based studied has been conducted by the authors showing the relation between quality of teaching and students’ feedback. This paper is based on this data based survey and it analyses the relevance and effectiveness and impact of student feedback system on quality of teaching learning process.