to be sick of feeble uni students? and want to know how to fix the education system?

[Anna1976]

I get the joy of dealing with uni students of a variety of backgrounds in the medical sciences. I've had it up to here with the feeble ones who don't have a sense of ownership of their own education... and expect to be spoon-fed on how to do things... and never just get on and find things out. What is so hard about putting in the effort to be able to defend your point of view? We don't expect you to know everything, just know how to learn something and defend it.

I've just finished suggesting to one that as he will be defending his PhD in under 6 months perhaps he could go and read the literature on the techniques i'm teaching him, and thus be able to make choices about experimental design in his own PhD, which is meant to be his own original research.

Based on the discussion on the life skills that all children need thread - how are these kids getting so far into tertiary education with this kind of approach to learning? What needs to be fixed to make people be a bit more proud of their ability to sort themselves out and learn independently??

( Arrggh.)

[maypole1]

OTheHugeManatee dont agree poorer students were the ones studying these non courses that fact that the fees are going up have already pushed people away from the dreaded media studies and towards maths Ect


If I new my son was bright despite our income I would encourage him to take the debt because the money you can earn as a doctor is well worth it


I fear it will only put those of wanting to do Micky mouse courses and is that really a bad thing we need more nurses, doctors and engineers we. Don't need more journalists or csi people

[worldgonecrazy]

maypole the irony is that media studies is not a course that anyone wishing to become a journalist should study. All the top journalists that I know of studied subjects such as Economics, History, Politics, etc. that enable them to become informed commentators.

[VictorGollancz]

This 'lesser' university thing gets right on my tits as well. Obviously there is a heirarchy, but there are standardisation bodies that ensure there is no vast disparity between the quality of degrees.

Quality of resources, yes (obviously Oxford has benefited from agreements with publishers); amount of money, yes - meaning that the lecturers don't have to teach as much and can churn out research instead. Older usually means richer, and it means students are placed in close proximity to quality resources. Doesn't mean they know what to do with them though!

This notion that there's hundreds of institutions turning out utterly useless degrees is such a load of old toss.

[VictorGollancz]

Media graduates command some of the highest wages of any graduate career.

[SomethingBlue]

I agree, Victor, re the PhDs. In my field the funding has been decimated and doctoral student number are dwindling. Brilliant candidates have to choose either terrifying debt or, quite reasonably, turn away from academia. I worry about the pool for recruiting future lecturers. The humanities risk becoming a rich person's game, like some kind if Grand Tour. Whereas, at their best, the humanities should be about taking a long view of culture and society, and about giving voices to the voiceless. It's perverse if only the children of the wealthy can afford to think about those questions.

[dontrunwithscissors]

I'm a lecturer in History. Doctoral funding in my field is very, very hard to get. This means that, unless someone is independently wealthy, only the truly brilliant students go on to do a PhD.

[VictorGollancz]

Actually, I might have to retract that after doing a bit of googling. It was certainly what I was told by some researchers who do the whole 'employability' surveys of graduates. And it's not my subject!

I don't really care though. I think that anyone who trundles off to uni expecting to graduate and be handed the keys to a nice office of their own is very, very wrong, and we shouldn't encourage them to think that. They should, however, be told that a chance to study and think and write is of immense value.

And it gives people more choices! A graduate with a 2:2 in Media (derided by many in this thread) has ensured that they can be accepted onto a PCGE, if they decide that teaching is what they want to do in later life. They have ensured that they can continue to a graduate programme, again, if they decide that's what they want to do. It's all about options.

[SomethingBlue]

Though Victor, to your last post, it is not the case that at Oxbridge the vast majority lecturers don't have to teach as much. The teaching model is incredibly labour intensive, and a lot of the surplus is done by exploited unemployed PhDs, or people on crap contracts. The prestige means they can always find someone who'll do it. I've got many friends who have moved there from other unis and been shocked.

[OTheHugeManatee]

maypole I might not have made myself clear. I wasn't suggesting that students from poorer background were for some reason attracted to Mickey Mouse degrees. More that flooding the job market with degree-educated people, without there being any clear ways of differentiating between good and less good degrees, has made it harder for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, who've worked their socks off to achieve and make it to university against the odds, to stand out once they've got their degrees.

I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'm thinking of people like my DP, who grew up in working-class Liverpool but made it to Oxford and thence to a high-flying career. He's said on a number of occasions that if he'd been born in the 80s or 90s rather than the 70s there is no way he would have managed to do that, as it was only because of student grants that he felt able to go to university. He's a tribal Labour voter, but is very, very angry with New Labour for having made it so much harder - as he sees it - for kids like he was to change their circumstances.

[Salmotrutta]

I agree with Donki about students resisting the independent learning route nowadays.
When I was at school it was very common for the teachers to tell us to read Chapter X at home in preparation for the next lesson - and if you hadn't done it then tough, because they would just launch right in and expect you to keep up. And that was normally in addition to other homework.

We did a lot more extended writing then too (good for literacy skills) - another thing that pupils resist these day. Give them an essay and they will do the bare minimum. Not all of them to be fair but a good proportion.

[VictorGollancz]

SomethingBlue I'm not familiar with Oxbridge but I know there are several RG unis where nine hours of contact time was the norm, because of the high levels of research and research contracts they were supposed to attract each year. Of course, that's gone out of the window now because there's no money to pay the exploited PhD students and Visiting Lecturers. Where the govt. thinks the research is going to come from now, I don't know! Of course, they don't pay for teaching now and all the lecturers are going to be too busy teaching to apply for research grants, so it's win-win for the vandalising, short-sighted, over-privileged bunch of wankers that are the current government.

[Booboostoo]

OTheHugeManatee I don't how we should go about widening access (which is something I am very much in favour of) but I do know that targets are not the way to do it. Non-university training should be more valued and we shouldn't have to turn everything into a university course.

VictorGollancz The tutorial system at Oxford although amended (changed from 2 to 4 students to a tutor) is still exceptionally demanding in terms of contact hours. Other Unis have had to altogether abandon it, e.g. Reading moved from 2 student tutorials, to 12-15 student seminars - an entirely different method of teaching for a topic such as philosophy and what leads to PhD students never having had one to one attention.

As for standards and poor students always failing, I shall give you two stories (I have millions more like these):

• I popped into the Students' Union and the person who was helping me out was a recent philosophy graduate so we chatted about his degree etc. He then had to fill in a form for me and had to put down my department...he asked me how to spell 'philosophy'!
  

• MRes in ethics student has applied for every extension under the sun for 4 out of 6 essays and for his dissertation. Comes to the final deadline right before Christmas and he calls his tutor in distress because his printer won't print. She agrees to an informal extension till after the holiday provided he e-mails a copy of the work now...Christmas comes and goes by March the student hasn't submitted anything either by e-mail or hard copy. He has been sent two e-mails and one letter to his home address (he had left the Uni area as his degree had finished 7 months previously) letting him know that he has missed the deadline and any submissions would be considered re-submissions now. Finally in April he sends in the work by post: the dissertation and two of the essays are fails, another essay is plagiarised (word for word from a published article) so the plagiarism committee fails him. Examinations officer and external agree that all procedures were correctly followed, the essays were resubmissions and with 4 marks at 0% he should fail the degree. He appeals. His excuse on the plagiarism was "it was not plagiarism, adn if it was plagiarism it's because I have psychological problems". His excuse for not submitting on time was "I didn't know about the submission date or the consequences of not submitting and no one told me" (we had e-mailed him twice, written to him, the info is the course handbook and the web). Appeals committee upholds the appeal, he gets the opportunity to resubmit everything including the plagiarised essay and passes, by the skin of his teeth, but he passed!

[NotQuiteSoDesperate]

This is a very interesting discussion for me. My whole career (5 years) has involved teaching secondary school students about independent learning, research skills, handling information, plagiarism, finding authoritative sources, organising information, presentation and so on using multimedia resources: books, journals, online databases, websites etc. Every day, I help students to improve their skills and also spend a lot of time teaching teachers these skills too! However, people like me are a dying breed as schools are sacking my colleagues and closing down their libraries all over the country. Professional librarians working in schools have been trying to tackle these issues for decades.

I am lucky in that my current school values my work and I am trying hard to make an impact on our students from our Junior School too so that we can develop ways of combatting the cut-and-paste culture. Perhaps you should be campaigning for professional librarians in schools! After all, there is no statutory duty on schools to even have a library, never mind a librarian.

DS2 has just finished his first year at Uni and has reported back to me that amongst his friends, he feels that he is the only one who has the skills to do a lot of the work - thanks to his Mum :) He has been shocked at how some of his friends have been struggling this year.

[Booboostoo]

Interestingly enough Oxford will now interview students with predicted A level grades lower than A (at least in philosophy) because they are concerned that the grades do not reflect the students' abilities. I was chatting to the philosophy admissions tutor and he was telling me how they interviewed a very bright girl, independent, imaginative, critical thinker, with poor references from her school for not being conformist enough in her thinking and therefore unlikely to do well at A level!

[kalidasa]

Booboo - yes, I think this increasingly a real issue that in the past was really confined to GCSE - that as A levels have become more mechanical some quirky, bright students will underperform. On the other hand, you do want to feel sure that even a very bright student also has the discipline to follow the course. I have interviewed for both Ox and Cam in the past (now a lecturer at another RG uni) and certainly I was uninterested in strings of A*s at GCSE, as long as the grades looked basically good (not necessarily outstanding) for the school.

Similarly, asking them to send work in advance was sometimes very revealing, especially in e.g. language work - I remember a student whose (correct) work had been wrongly marked by their school teacher, for instance. Especially with subjects like languages, you really do want to have a sense of the quality of the school teaching as obviously that can make a big difference to achievement at A-level/entrance tests.

I have no problem with the big change in the profile of A level grades in itself, as long as everyone is prepared to admit that A levels have become something close to a general school leaving certificate (useful as an indication of general intelligence and application) and that they are no longer of much use, if any, for distinguishing the top few percent. If you an admissions tutor who can both set your own entrance test and interview your candidates, as is often the case in Oxford and Cambridge, then you can essentially ignore them. Much more of a problem at places (like my uni) that isn't doing either.

[InMyPrime]

Victor, doctoral funding is very variable from field to field. In medicine / biotech, it's relatively plentiful because PhD candidates in that area are regarded more or less as cheap labour for the PIs' labs and are actually a fairly vital part of the research funding food chain. It's more like a low-paid RA job than a PhD in the arts / humanities sense which is an independently led project. WHen I asked colleagues with biotech PhDs about the work they had done, it sounded more like guided research done as part of an established lab and funded through a wider research grant than independent work. They had basically worked the (long!) hours of an RA with their PI acting like their line manager rather than a guiding supervisor. That is a recent development in biotech though, AFAIK, and not something that was common even 10 years ago. I think it annoys older people in the field as well as it has devalued their PhDs by association.

In my area (economics / politics) you have to come up with your own idea for a research proposal, apply for funding either independently or with a supervisor and key ideas should come from you, not your supervisor, although s/he would advise where appropriate. I had assumed all PhDs were the same until I worked with people from the biotech / medicine and other technical fields.

[VictorGollancz]

BooBooStoo Oxbridge is clearly out of the ordinary with regards to the tutorial system (I think York uses it as well). Your second example of a failing student is horrific, but it doesn't sound like something that happens an awful lot!

NotQuiteSoDesperate If I had any money I would pay you all of it so that you could run a summer course for prospective students. Right not, they're having to pick these skills up in their first year rather than coming ready-prepared.

All education is just one big long academic rung - universities have a lot to do when they're presented with students who are used to referencing Wikipedia and submitting multiple drafts of an essay.

InMyPrime That's really interesting, thank-you. My area sounds the same as yours; if my supervisor had had to tell me how to research he'd blow a gasket.

[NotQuiteSoDesperate]

Whoops! My whole career is 25 years, not 5!

VictorGollancz - that's nice of you! Unfortunately, as I said, professional school librarians are dying out. As we retire, we are not being replaced with younger people. Many of us are being made redundant and our libraries replaced with IT rooms. The best school libraries are a balance of all media and the librarians teach, rather than sit wielding a date stamp!

Of course, Uni librarians themselves also run courses on research skills, but so many students seem to avoid their expertise. I suppose, if they have not had a good library and librarian at school, then they don't have a clue what the Uni library and librarians have to offer. It makes it so much harder for the Uni staff. Same for FE of course.

My school is listening because I am making the case that we should prepare our students for life beyond school. Not just sit back with the nice thought that we have got them into Higher and Further Education, but actually prepare them to cope with the next stage after school. It is hard to make our Sixth Form engage though - they see this middle aged librarian and make (stupid) assumptions. That's why I am now going to work with the younger students from our Junior School and try to develop a progression of information literacy skills teaching from the littlest pupils upwards. Hard work though!

[Booboostoo]

VictorGollancz I am obviously just one academic but I have worked since 1996 at Reading, Leeds and Keele and in my experience the second student is not an exception. I have sat on endless plagiarism committees, taking ages to establish that there was indeed plagiarism, only for the Uni to back down from any action because of the fear of litigation. The rarity is for an appeals committee NOT to uphold an appeals procedure. Here's another example: I had marked an exam essay as a very clear first and the second marker had it as a third so I was a bit shocked at the difference of opinion...turns out the entire essay was a direct copy of the lecturer's comprehensive handout (the lecturer was also the second marker so clearly he was familiar with his own handout, which I wasn't). Could we fail the student for plagiarism? No! Could we fail for poor work? No! Apparently the lowest mark we could give was a third as "you can't plagiarise your lecturer's handouts" - you what???

And now for the other side, the Uni letting down students...the Medical School at Leeds cottoned on to a great scam. Students from Asia are extremely keen to study in the UK and willing to pay the extraordinary oversees fees, so Leeds participated in a system which allowed 2 medical students who had completed the first 2 years of their training in Korea to join the 3rd year of the Leeds medical school. When they arrived no one was assigned to look after them as foreign students, their personal tutor told them he was too busy to see them and they should talk to their classmates for info and help, the library had not been informed of their arrival so it was 3 months before they got a library card (can you imagine surviving the medical school workload without access to resources), their English was OKish but not good enough to cope unassisted (no one had checked on this) and their background totally different from the UK so when faced with courses in ethics, communication skills, critical thinking skills, etc. they just failed (no one in these courses had been told of their arrival or their background). The usual mechanisms for catching failing students before they failed did not work as the students were not used to our culture (they never approached their lecturers for help, when asked if all was well they would literally bow and smile without saying anything, etc.) By the time I saw them individually after they had failed they were practically suicidal (they came from a culture where academic achievement was everything, they had competed with all the medical students in their country for these spots and failure was just not an option) but it took my colleague and me 3 hours to get them to talk to us. Both my colleague and I wrote formal letters to the medical school outlining the shortcomings, we never received a reply and the only thing that changed was that the next year the intake increased to 8 students.

[doesthisseemright]

From a lecturers perspective, I have no training in counselling or in assisting os students. I am an expert in what i teach but really dont agree lecturers whould be personal tutors

And for those who dont know...the role doesnt include academic support/tutoring, its babysitting.

[beckybrastraps]

So she or he had memorised the lecturer's handout and reproduced it under exam conditions?

[doesthisseemright]

What level was she? Id give a third if it was level 6.

[beckybrastraps]

I saw my personal tutor three times during my degree. Twice to get my options form signed (formality), and the final time, laughably, to ask for a reference when applying for postgrad places. My total conversation with him would be less than 5 minutes I reckon.

[doesthisseemright]

[littlebluespring]

I know there are lots of problems in the education system, but I have had some very good experiences.

My son's school is excellent. The teaching is of a very high standard and prepares children for the kind of independent work they will be required to do at university.

If PhD students are failing to understand what is required, or even not really being expected to deliver independent research, that is a failing within medicine and related fields. It is not something that reflects on the quality of research training for PhD students or postgraduate students in general in other disciplines. The ideas that an MSc student would expect to pass without having ever looked at a reading list is just bizarre and not something that I have ever come across.

I'm not saying these things don't happen. There are certainly huge problems in schools and in some departments in some disciplines. But these issues are to do with poor management of institutions and poor government planning. They don't reflect an issue with the academic integrity of most researchers, lecturers or teachers.