Data intelligence

In 2019/20, The Open University underreported the number of qualifications awarded due to administrative delays as a result of changes to assessment timetabling. There is a reduction of around 8,225 qualifications awarded in the 2019/20 data return in comparison to 2018/19. Most of this drop was seen among part time undergraduate students. The reduction is reflected in a lower population of survey respondents for the Graduate Outcomes survey of an estimated 7,900 responses. These qualifications were returned in the 2020/21 student data, the 2020/21 Graduate Outcomes population reflects this.

In 2020/21, there was an error in the census year referred to in the Welsh language version of the Graduate Outcomes survey.

There were just over 3,280 responses received from graduates who had the option to complete the survey in Welsh at these providers. Of these responses, approximately 300 were completed in Welsh. Around two thirds of these Welsh responses were collected via Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) and, following extensive checks of recordings, we could confirm that interviewers corrected the census year at the time of interview. These responses could therefore be confirmed as referring to the correct census year and retained as part of the dataset. The remaining third of these responses were completed online and could not be verified as relating to the correct census year. As a result, due to the data quality concerns, all the online survey responses to the Welsh language version of the survey have been removed from the dataset.

These graduates were not removed from the surveyable population dataset used as a base population to calculate response rates; they will appear as ‘non-respondents’ to the survey.