Measuring Academic Progress with the Education Balanced Scorecard
The education balanced scorecard is a useful tool when you want to measure the performance of an academic institution. Just make sure the metrics you use are indeed effective ones.
The development of the education balanced scorecard or BSC is no trivial matter. This is because the education BSC is very important when you want to gauge the performance of an academic institution accurately. This is why it becomes extremely helpful to check the performance metrics that top of the line universities all over the world are using today. These are metrics that you can make use of as track indicators, as benchmarks, so to speak. By using these metrics as a guide, it would be easier for you to develop your own scorecard for your own academic prowess.
The metrics that you will find in the system, as well as the ones that you will be using, would be both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The quantitative metrics are easy to use in terms of measurement because they are already quantifiable. An example of this is research funding assessment. All you really need to do here is assess just how effective research funding is. Since the metric is already quantifiable and you are dealing with quantifiable stats and figures here, then the interpretation of the metric would not be difficult at all.
The challenge comes in using qualitative metrics. This is because these are not simple to measure. It can be confusing estimating quality improvement when you base this on quantitative figures. Let us say that the number of graduates this academic year is higher than that of last year. It is easy enough to assume that this is a mark of improvement because more students did graduate. However, if you look deeper into the matter, this could just be because not all students who were supposed to graduate last year did graduate back then. In effect, those students who did not graduate last year would graduate this year, leading to more graduates altogether. In essence, you cannot really say that this is improvement in terms of academic performance – this indicates degradation in terms of coursework.
You also have to consider the possibility that universities would make use of metrics that are not entirely useful. For example, a university could use the qualitative metric % of graduates rating university experience as excellent. At first glance, this can be a useful metric in gauging how graduates view their university experience as a whole. However, this is a relative metric by nature because graduates would be using different bases in gauging their university experience. Some might take into account the syllabus or curriculum offered per course. Others might take into consideration their extracurricular activities. With biases at hand, it is important to choose quantity targets so that the ones you choose would indeed reflect what you want to measure – which is education quality altogether.
Oftentimes, the measures to be incorporated in an education balanced scorecard need to be process-oriented. Such metrics used in this arena can be credit hours taught to students and actual course enrolment. Whatever metric you choose to use, just make sure that all of them are indeed relevant to the goals and objectives that you want to achieve as a university or academic institution. This way, you will have a very effective scorecard in your hands.
