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.)

[Booboostoo]

beckybrastraps yes it was a rather remarkably feat of memorisation! She had managed to reproduce, under exam conditions, the lecturer's handout pretty much verbatim! This was the only course assessment and she passed based on that.

QR don't start me on personal tutoring! Disabled student who had decided to stop her antidepressants comes to see me (a philosophy lecturer with no counseling knowledge whatsoever), so I suggest she:

• speak to Uni counselling services: they turned her away because they were not qualified to deal with the severity of her problems.
  
• her disability advisor: had not been responding to e-mails and telephone messages for 2 weeks
  
• her GP: felt unqualified to deal with her, referred to emergency psychiatric services but there was a 2 month waiting list.
  

So what do I do when she calls me at home at 7 in the evening,crying so hard I can't figure out what the problem is?

This is total system failure.

[doesthisseemright]

boobootoo this worries me immensely. I am not equipped to deal with such things and Im afraid of the consequences if there are problems with these students (litigation/duty of care). I have had to deal with all sorts this last year, its crazy.

[kakapo]

OP, don't spoon feed the PhD students then. They are MORE than capable of sorting themselves out, and will if you leave them to it. And if they don't, and fail then, well, problem solved.

[cory]

This year I was very anxious to encourage students to take up my offers to see them personally for individual essay tuition so I circulated an appointments list. 8 students out of 20 failed to keep the appointments they themselves had signed up for without any explanation or notice whatsoever- I wasted an entire afternoon.

I also have a weekly office hour - and hardly any of the students have taken advantage.

I give out my email at the start of every course; typically, I get the email asking about their choice of topic less than 24 hours before the deadline- and then they grumble if they don't get an instant reply.

They seem to assume that all appointments have to be at their convenience because I have nothing else to do all day.

In the evaluations some of these students complained that they had not had enough individual support because I can't always stop and talk immediately after class (it takes me a good 15 minutes to run to the other end of the campus for my next lecture, which is exactly the amount of time available).

I would now tend to be a bit suspicious of students complaining that they don't get to talk to their tutor- my first question would be "how hard did you try?"

[cory]

Our pastoral supports system is extremely good though: I would know exactly what to do with a depressed or ill student and would feel confident that the relevant contact people would spring into action and provide the proper support. Dyslexia services, counselling, financial advice- can't fault any of them.

[MamaChocoholic]

I am about to take on my first two PhD students, and after experience of feeble and plagiarising medical undergrads in one of the top medical schools in the country, I'm really hoping that I've chosen these students well. We had one funded place, and I did decide that if the right candidate didn't present him/herself, I would rather leave the place unfilled than coach a poor student through. I think there needs to be tougher filters on accepting students for PhD positions in the first place, and tougher criteria at the first year viva.

[Andrewofgg]

Students should be selected on actual A level results ? not predictions and promises ? for the following October ? so everyone takes a gap year. Some would decided not to do it or not show up ? but they would be the same ones who drop out so let them do it early without debts and without wasting anybody?s time.

The form of application should not disclose which school you went to or what sort of school, so there could be no social engineering. For the same reason there should be no questions about your parents? occupation or whether any of your family went into higher education.

[babeinthewood]

Forgive me, I though the whole poitn on university was independent learning?!??!!! I actually applaud the tutition free increase, on the basis that alot of the kids who do it just so they can bum around for a few more years, will decrease. Bring back scholarships for those who are bright and applied enough to go, and ditch this 'anyone can go to uni' attitude

YANBU these kids nake to take more responsibility for themselves PERIOD!!

[EuphemiaMcGonagall]

Why no social engineering, Andrew? Do people from less well-off backgrounds not deserve to benefit from HE?

[babeinthewood]

I think what andrew is trying to say is get people in (or not) on their own merits, and not disclose those details so that its a fairer system, IE: no-one would know what kind of background you have, so youd be selected on your abilities iyswim

[EuphemiaMcGonagall]

But there is so much more to how someone performs in education than their intellectual abilities.

[Andrewofgg]

babeinthewood - spot on. If you give that information to universities they will indulge their political and social prejudices - and if they don't they can be suspected of doing it. Without the information they can't do it and can't be suspected of it.

[EuphemiaMcGonagall]

Universities have political and social prejudices? Where's your evidence for that?

[GrendelsMum]

AndrewFog's suggestion is generally seen in HE outreach circles as having potential benefits for students from non traditional backgrounds, who tend to have lower a level predictions, relative to their eventual grades, than students from traditional backgrounds. thus some students are encouraged to apply for less prestigious universities and for less competitive courses than their a level grades would suggest.

However, I'm really just posting to say I've had two student interns this summer who have been superb. hard working, motivated, independent, competent, intelligent - really excellent young people who deserve a very happy and successful future.

[littlebluespring]

MamaChocoholic, you're generalising about PhD students from your experience within medicine.

You're not the first person to do so on this thread. I would say that indicates a problem with medicine as a discipline, not PhD students.

AndrewofGG, making all students have a gap year is further increasing the amount of time a female graduate has to wait before she can have children, which is already problematic. Unless you are suggesting women get pregnant prior to entering higher education?

[ziptoes]

it's the bloody targets innit. I've completely forgotten the name for the XXX effect that when you use somethings as a measure of effectiveness it ceases to have any meaning. So when you use SATs for school league tables everyone just teaches to the test and so on. Someone on here will know the proper name.

Now that PhD completion is part of the REF (quality testing for univs), perhaps it is less painful for a dept to baby along a weak student than chuck them out 6 months before their viva? On the other hand I think if one of my PhD students was that hopeless 6 months before their viva, I would wonder what I'd been doing for the last 3-3.5 years. As supervisors we do have some responsibilities to challenge our research students, no?

[MamaChocoholic]

no little, I am not generalising about PhD students. (I was one, once!). and I'm not in medicine, I just used to work in a school of medicine. I am saying that as supervisors we have a responsibility to select students for postdoc study carefully.

[PumpkinBones]

I went to an RG uni (although I only discovered this via MN!) ten years ago (ish) and we had 8 hours contact time for 3 modules per semester - we were expected to do 32 hours a week independent study, and were given "exams" where you basically came in, got given an essay question then returned 48 hours later with our completed essay. It was an arts degree, so obviously less facts based learning so more scope for independent work but even so I am incredibly surprised that there are students at Phd level expecting high levels of support - as an undergraduate, it seemed right that we were expected to take an active part in managing our own learning, and certainly I don't remember ever hearing anyone express that they needed more support, or dissatisfaction with the approach.

[littlebluespring]

But ziptoes, is there any evidence that PhD students are any weaker in disciplines other than in medicine and related fields?

It seems to me still to be the case that there are far more competent students who want to do a PhD than there is funding to support them all. Applying for PhD funding is still highly competitive and I cannot see that there has been a drop in standards.

If anything, doing a PhD seems harder now because students are expected to gain a wide variety of skills and experience beyond those of actually completing the thesis - lecturing and so on. PhD students are now expected to do research training that is more similar to the longer US system but still somehow fit it into the 3-4 year period of a UK funded PhD.

[hopenglory]

There is certainly something about the apathy of the current crop of students with regards to their learning - I've been told on a number of occasions that 'I'm can't be arsed to do that, I won't get any marks for it'

[Minus273]

I would go as far as saying independent thought is actively discouraged and actually has been for some time. I remember, aged 8, trying to find out more about a topic we were doing in class and I asked a question about a bit I didn't understand. I still remember the humiliation of being shouted at and being told that I would have the impudence knocked out of me. Thankfully for me I kept reading around subjects but became very good at pretending I didn't know something that 'I wasn't supposed to know'. The teachers' attitude could easily have had a very different effect.

[kakapo]

In general though the US system isn't really longer - in most places you sign up for a PhD straight out of undergrad. So it seems longer because it's masters and PhD combined, and they just call it 'PhD'.

[littlebluespring]

A masters and PhD combined is a common funding route in the UK now; it still has to be completed, according to funding body rules, within 5 years. That is shorter than a US PhD of 7-10 years.

A lot more is expected of US PhD students; they spend a huge amount of time doing work that does not directly contribute towards an original thesis but is simply work on a wider project. This is in addition to studying for what would in the UK be their masters and, further on, often having heavy teaching loads.

I don't think UK PhDs are anything like that yet. What is being described on here as going on in medicine, biotech etc sounds as if the students are being asked to spend 3 years of their time working on a wider project and not on their own original ideas. If researchers want PhD students to do both, then they need to extend the length of time it takes to complete a PhD.

Prior to this thread, I have never heard anyone suggest that the standard of PhD candidates if falling. But I am speaking from a position of ignorance about what goes on in a medical PhD.

[Glitterandglue]

I've just finished a degree in Social Work and found the apathy of quite a large amount of students utterly depressing. This is on a course where people are supposedly aiming for a profession in which they will be performing multiple roles, including counselling, advocating, signposting, mediating and so on. The course started with 120 students and I think went down to about 100 by second or third year. Throughout second and third year the average attendance for any lecture was about forty students. In some lectures, especially close to the end of a module, it was as low as ten. This, despite us being told constantly throughout the course that if we missed any lectures without good reason this would be questioned and we may well be failed. They told us towards the end of year three that anyone who'd missed more than three sessions that year for whatever reason would be told to come to an individual tutorial to explain their absences and fill out some reasoning form. As far as I could work out from the people I spoke to (there were probably eight people max who'd never missed a session in year three, including me), that never happened. Several of my mates got their final classifications and no mention of any missed sessions.

The reason why they kept saying they were so hot on attendance (hot air, for sure) was because to pass the Social Work degree you have to have had 200 days teaching and 200 days placement time. If they had actually kept to that requirement, the fail rate for the course would've been astromonical.

Mind, in the students' defence, I could totally understand the apathy. The teaching was often ropey, support was completely dependent on who your tutor was and communication between the lecturers and clarity of expectations was horrendous. I have never been so glad to leave a place!

[kakapo]

i'm a postdoc in the US, and the average here in the north west seems to be 5-6 years (masters/PhD combined). Does it differ in different parts of the US?