We don't need your stinkin' NSS rules!

Now, I don't actually know if there ARE official NSS rules.  For those of you who don't know, the NSS is the national student satisfaction survey.  The scores are highly weighted in the UK university rankings.  You can see that some of the post-1992 universities owe their increased rankings to increased NSS scores.  Not research, not student spending, not student to teacher ratios...student satisfaction.  So, have we improved our teaching to such a huge degree that we've moved up so much in  the rankings?  Have we hired SO many new, super-qualified people that students are so much more satisfied than they were just 3 years ago?  Maybe, but I'm going to guess that's a pretty big ask.  So, it appears that we help it along a little bit.  You know, by having highly exclusive holiday lunches that are ONLY for only the 3rd year, non-foreign students (the target of the NSS) where we tell students how great our NSS scores have been and how they anticipate that the students will give us even BETTER scores this year!  This is the soft-sell.  The harder sell will come closer to NSS itself where we tell them that if the good scores don't continue, the value of their degree will decrease as our rankings decrease.  No pressure, eh?  I've even heard about departments taking their NSS students for week long field trips to fun places to fill out the surveys.  Noooo, not trying to bias the outcome at all.  But hey, if there are rules, they don't apply to us, at least they don't as long as we move up in the rankings.