The Quality Gap of Educational Services from the Point of View of Students in Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Higher education is growing fast and every day it is more and more exposed to the globalization processes. The quality of educational Services, with emphasis on students’ satisfaction, is a newly emerging field of concern. This study was carried out to determine the quality gap of educational services based on students’ perceptions and expectations in Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences. In this cross-sectional study, 300 students were selected randomly and asked to fill out a questionnaire designed according to SERVQUAL method. This questionnaire measures students’ perceptions and expectations in five dimensions of educational services including assurance, responsiveness, empathy, reliability and tangibles. Quality gap of educational services was determined by calculating the difference between students’ perceptions and expectations. According to the results, there were negative quality gaps in all of the five dimensions. The greatest gap (-1.14) was in responsiveness dimension followed respectively by empathy (-0.95), assurance (-0.89), tangibles (-0.84) and reliability (-0.71). There were significant differences among the means of quality gap in all of the five domains (p=0.0001). Negative quality gap of educational services indicates that students’ expectations are more than their perceptions and in none of the studied dimensions; students’ perceptions have met their expectations. Thus, in planning for the improvement of educational services quality, students’ expectations, especially in the dimensions with higher negative gaps should be considered as priority