The Higher Education sector, perhaps more than any other, is renowned for its acronyms and abbreviations. It’s just one of the ways we have of showing how smart we are and of protecting everything we regard as special.
There are more created every year and all self-respecting wonks need to work hard to stay on top of the alphabet challenge. It has been some time our last acronym quiz and therefore it seemed about time we offered up another one. We’ve got a selection of current and historical ones to test you out here. So how well do you know your HE acronyms and abbreviations?
First set – what a strange set of letters
CASE
HUMANE
USHA
HEPISG
ARWU
HECoS
POLAR
HUCS
DTC
HEBCoN
Second set – 10 relevant government and sector bodies that have bitten the dust in the last 15 years
DfES
OST
BIS
LSC
DCSF
OFFA
DEL(NI)
NCTL
OSI
BERR
See how many you can get without Googling and put your score in the comments section below or on Twitter #HEacronyms – we’ll see who really knows best. Answers here.
So, how many did you get?
17-20 Outstanding. Top of the heap. First class wonkery
13-16 Not bad, pretty solid wonking, but try a bit harder next time eh?
8-12 You really are university challenged.
< 8 It seems you’re in the wrong quiz.
I’m definitely in the wrong quiz, although I wonder if my institution has more acronyms than any other and how other places theme theirs. We have a definite theme, see if you can spot it, with NILE (Northampton Integrated Learning Environment), CLEO (Collaborative Learning Experiences Online), CAIeRO (Creating Aligned Interactive educational Resource Opportunities), TUNDRA (The University of Northampton Document Repository and Archive) ….