Teaching Quality Assessment

QAA Academic Review of Economics: January 2002

In January 2002, the Department of Economics was visited by the QAA Academic Review Panel, the official body responsible within the UK for assessing teaching quality of university departments.  This was the most recent time at which UK Universities were independently assessed in terms of their quality of teaching and learning.

A letter of the QAA panel's assessment findings to the University Principal contains the following main judgements:

Overall, the reviewers have confidence in the academic standards achieved in the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Economics at the University. The Reviewers came to the following judgments on the quality of learning opportunities as described in the Handbook for Academic Review:

• Teaching and Learning: commendable
• Student Progression: commendable
• Learning Resources: commendable

In each case these are the highest attainable judgements for each category.

The complete transcript of the QAA Assessment is available here. Please note that the QAA refers to two postgraduate degrees previously offered by the Department: the MSc in Business Economics and the MSc in Industrialisation, Trade and Economic Policy. Since the QAA visit, these two degrees have now been superceded by the MSc Economic Management and Policy Programme and, most recently, by the MSc in Applied Economics.

Research Quality

The Department of Economics, including the Fraser of Allander Institute, was included in the Strathclyde Business School's submission to RAE 2008.  We had by far the best RAE results of any Business School in Scotland by a very large margin (on all measures of performance), with 25% of our research rated "world leading" and 40% "internationally excellent".  We were also in the top ten of UK Business Schools in terms of our research profile.