IELTS Research Reports

A multiple case study of the relationship between the indicators of students’ English languagecompetence on entry and students’ academic progress at an international postgraduate universitythe sole measure. Sometimes these attitudes viewed selection decisions as a matter of administration,informed by issues of efficiency and resource use, such as the view below in Extract 12 gained fromexperience at another UK university.Extract 12“We had a set up in the department where there were a number of admissions tutors that wererecruiting for each of the separate degrees and we were all spending quite a lot of time doingthat task and we realised that a lot of the task wasn’t academic. It was mainly administrative.The place where I came from we eventually appointed an administrator and her role was tocarry out all the admissions tasks in the department except from where it was borderline. Soshe would say, no, these are clearly reject, you’re going to see it factually, there are set criteriaand all these are clearly accept and then there was a middle mound where she used to pick upthe pile and go around the corridor and then go to talk to the academics and say what do youthink from an academic point of view? And I would have said that probably most of my task sofar on admissions, I’m only making an academic decision about 20% of the time.”Focus group participantAlthough this participant is describing events outside the institution under study, it is congruent withother Course Directors’ views, albeit a minority. The attitudes contrast with the view in the researchliterature that greater knowledge about the tests amongst those concerned with admissions andselection will lead to sounder selection decisions. It suggests that there may be resistance on the partof some academics towards further training in this area. In connection with this, no consensus emergedfrom the interviewees about the necessity for any additional training in selection.The privacy within which selection decisions are made calls into question how Course Directors learnabout admissions and selection. When new to the role, almost all had been mentored by their predecessorand had learnt through a combination of experience and advice from colleagues (Extract 13).Extract 13“Some of it you just gain from chatting to your colleagues. What do you think of this personwhen you first start getting applications through and then you just start to do it on a feelingfrom experience. Well I’ve had someone through with a similar application before so we’llgive them a go sort of thing.”CH Course DirectorMentoring works well when the previous Course Director remains in the institution but if he or sheleaves then the incoming Director may be remarkably unsupported. Unsurprisingly, the one CourseDirector whose predecessor left the institution felt there was a place for formal training for newCourse Directors.8.3 Course Directors’ views of NNES students academic and linguistic processThis section contributes to the second aim of the study by presenting the opinions of Course Directorsabout the linguistic and academic progress of their NNES students; particularly those with English testscores. As no attempts were made to refer to specific students currently studying at Cranfield in theinterviews, the views expressed are couched in general terms but with some individual examples takenfrom experience.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11157