Ideal Student

The ideal student book is now out! Available from major online bookstores.

Visit our new website here.

The Ideal Student project aims to better understand what is expected of university students. Implicit and unspoken expectations, especially from staff, can result in diverse but patterned student experiences, and contribute to wider social inequalities and reproductions.

We aim to map out the student characteristics that are valued by staff and students themselves, across four broad disciplines of arts & humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and applied sciences. By understanding how the ‘ideal’ learner is constructed in specific contexts, staff and students can better recognise and address differences in their expectations.

Read our short blog on why the concept of the ideal student is important, from our new website (currently under construction).

Read more about the use of the survey as a teaching activity for induction or module introduction.

To complete a seminar version of the survey (at Imperial), click here