How students experience university plays a major role in their academic, personal and professional
success. Over the last decade Australian universities and governments have placed considerable
emphasis on key facets of the student experience such as skills development, student engagement,
quality teaching, student support, and learning resources. Reflecting this, a project was conducted in
2012 to furnish a new national architecture for collecting feedback on understanding the improving
the student experience.
The University Experience Survey (UES) has been developed by the Australian Government to
provide a new national platform for measuring the quality of teaching and learning in Australian
higher education. The UES focuses on aspects of the student experience that are measurable, linked
with learning and development outcomes, and for which universities can reasonably be assumed to
have responsibility. The survey yields results that are related to outcomes across differing
institutional contexts, disciplinary contexts and modes of study. The UES provides new crossinstitutional
benchmarks that can aid quality assurance and improvement