To think Uni students are a right moaning pita compared to when I went

[ohtobemoanproof]

Im a lecturer.

When I went to University-we went to the lectures, took notes from the board or overheads, went home, studied, did the exams etc, got our marks whenever they were ready and went away. No bothering the lecturers ( ever), no having their emails and demanding appointments, no arguing the toss over coursework marks, no moaning and complaining.

Now, I feel almost "bullied" by some of the students (not high fee payers, in fact some are on a bursary). They constantly moan (about everything, not just me in case anyone suggests its my module leadership in question), are always at the door, send email critiques about the quality of highly appraised visiting expert speakers, threaten to sue if coursework is returned a day later than you suggest it will be back, blame the lecturer if they get lower marks than expected, demand formal public apologies if they dont receive central messages about "one off" timetable changes, bitch if lecture notes aren't on module spaces a week before the lecture is held...it goes on. Bloody nightmare.

Aibu to think this is a new breed and we just weren't like that "in my day".

sniffs and has some more gin

AuntFini at my university we are not allowed by statute to give our students their actual marks until after the exam boards in June. There is literally nothing we can do about that, even though we would love to. And most of the younger lecturers realise how important it is to get essays back as soon as humanly possible. But in my last job, I had to mark - I kid you not - A MILLION words per semester, and every piece of coursework had to have a whole page of feedback. Under those circumstances, it was physically not possible, not even working an 80-hour week, to get work back more quickly than 4 weeks.

Try, if you can, to see it from the other side. It's pretty crucifying.

To be honest, there is a lot of complaining by students on my course. That is because the organisation is completely shambolic.

It is not all the lecturers' fault - nor the admin, or the leadership team. But some of it is, and many students feel we are paying a lot of money for this course to have constant lectures cancelled - sometimes with no notice, so students have travelled 40miles plus into uni for no reason.

One course the lecturer went off sick on the first day of the uni year and has not returned. The replacement lecturer has now also gone on long term sick. The programme director's assistant (the programme director himself has also gone on long term sick) has just told us that everything we have been taught so far is completely irrelevant to our course and not what we are supposed to have been learning. So we now have about 6 week of lectures to cover the whole year's worth of work.

I have had 4 different dissertation supervisors this year. The first 2 are staff who have gone off sick, the this was the Head of Faculty, but she has decided she doesn't have the time, so I have just had a meeting with another lecturer who is taking me up. And it isn't really anybodies FAULT that this has happened - but it is very crap in our third year to have this level of disruption, particularly when we are paying quite a bit for the privilege of attending the university.

And on behalf of my fellow students, I would like to say I have been SHOCKED by how hard working most of them are. I thought being a student was all boozy nights out, and staying in bed all day - but most of them work bloody hard, rarely miss a lecture and hold down jobs as well.

Wow - crap spelling there -my apologies!

"One course the lecturer went off sick on the first day of the uni year and has not returned. The replacement lecturer has now also gone on long term sick. The programme director's assistant (the programme director himself has also gone on long term sick)"

Well that probably tells you everything you need to know about how bad the university's management is - not your immediate lecturers, the management. If I were some of you I would make alliances with your hideously overworked lecturers and raise merry hell, because the kind of pressure most universities put their front-line staff under is utterly unbearable and completely unsustainable.

Please - can we try, as fellow mothers, to have some compassion for one another's appalling situations?

(and oakmaiden you have my full sympathies; it sounds like the situation in your department is dire for the students.)

With me, i just want to get the best mark possible and it is a tad to do with fee's but more to do with lecture time/numbers in classes.

One subject i'm not the best at is pattern cutting, and last year we got two hours a week in a class of 40 students with one teacher.
It pissed me off, as we literally got 2 mins with the teacher, i know i am a grown up and should be able to figure it out myself, but i would like to feel i am actually being taught something.

DonInKillerHeels. I understand at your uni you're not allowed to give marks back but this lecturer keeps emailing us 'You'll get your results by 10am tomorrow'/'Sorry by Friday at the latest'/''Oh actually it'll be next monday' etc etc.

From a student's point of view I've seen a definite down turn this year in my department with regard to consistency in marking across modules and help from tutors. This has also coincided with our departmental office closing and sharing an office with 4 other departments, as well as losing 2 lecturers. I presume that lecturers are having to take on piles more admin as well as teaching and research. It definitely is not a job I would do, or could cope with. And I can't believe there aren't any off sick for stress, because they must be frazzled.

But that doesn't mean that for £3000 we students don't feel entitled to feedback and time with supervisors. If it were cheaper maybe we wouldn't feel this way, but increased fees have brought about, in my opinion, a feeling like we're paying for our degrees. As such, we feel as though we have more right to demand value for money. Whether that's fair on the lecturers or not.

The trouble is, students think they know what they want, but actually dancing to their demands instead of doing what is best for them has been completely counter-productive:

1. Students think they want more contact time, we all kill ourselves offering more contact time, half of them don't turn up and those that don't want contact time at different times

1. Students think they want their essays marked very quickly, but this happens and the quality of feedback goes down (inevitably), they then complain about this

1. Students want more open days/offer days etc, again, staff show up and few students do

1. Students feel they 'shouldn't fail', so they are given the opportunity to retake and retake, and then their degrees become devalued

1. Students want all the material online, including notes etc, they then don't have much engagement with the material and fail to develop critical thinking skills.

1. Students hate certain things (e.g. statistics) so it becomes optional, no-one takes it and there becomes a skills shortage and they can't do a basic report with percentages in it for work.

1. Students badger their lecturers about things they should be asking their student friends about (e.g. how to interpret an essay question, where to get materials), lecturers spend far too much time responding to emails and less time doing research.

Institutions should be telling their students what they require (e.g. only one set of exams, and if you fail, you fail) and leaving it at that. They need to set standards, keep to them and stop this inorexable slide towards trying to please these students (through the NSS survey) and start giving the students what they actually deserve for £9000 which is a first-class education which they can go on and use in the workplace or to benefit society as a whole.

And the point about research is a good one, lecturers are not just teachers for a slightly older age group, they are supposed to be the critical thinkers in our society, the ones questioning and researching and providing evidence for the important social, medical and scientific questions that we need answering as a society. Spending their entire time answering trivial emails (e.g. 'when are the essay marks back?' even when the date is set, 'can I miss the lecture as I have a rugby match?' 'can I do the exam on a different day as my parents have already booked my flight on that day?') stops them doing that.

Unfortunately how much students pay is a red herring as far as the universities are concerned, because (as someone else pointed out upthread) for every penny extra students pay, the government slashes the same off the university grant. So the students pay more for the same (or, with the new fees regime, less). It's totally appalling.

so what's going wrong?
Students paying loads of money and not feeling like they get value for it, lecturers overworked and undersupported. Where is all the money going?

Right. It's 9PM; back to the grindstone.

Oh, and another thing that pisses me off, i pay my £3,000 tuition fee's yet we still have to pay £100 per term for use of the provided equipment, thread, paper, ect, WTAF are they doing with the money.

• colour print-out's are £50p a sheet, (we have to print out lots)

The food is over priced in the canteen and shite, not just the canteen bottles of water are £1.50

boney you have clearly had a bad experience, so go ahead and complain. I was not making excuses for actions which are effectively breach of contract on the part of the lecturer. I would expect to lose my job if I did that, but such things very very rarely happen at the university I teach at.

OTOH the problems of part time contracts I was talking about mean that lecturers should not have to rearrange for the sake of students who do not have a good excuse for not being there (by which I mean illness or bereavement or similar; in one case I know of, being put in the witness protection programme). The university is ultimately responsible, not the lecturers, if the students think that they should be available 9 - 5 (ha ha) and the university is paying them for one hour per week. We are not slave labour.

BTW thank you laptopdancer and revoltingpeasant making good points.

I second DonInKillerHeels suggestion that the lecturers should work with the students more to make this situation known. Everyone is losing out, apart from the odd person who still has a high level research post and earns loads swanning around the world between conferences. While there is a huge campaign to save the NHS, the universities are going to shit and although there has been some opposition, it is nowhere near as strong as it should be.

BTW - some of the tales from students on here are appalling. I'd be fuming.

But if the university is getting the same amount, how can students expect to get more? Don't understand this thinking.

The thing is you make a transition from having been assessed for 13 years to getting something of an accessory. A very useful accessory but you're out of the sorting system. So you think as long as you make full use of everything that uni has, you'll end up at the top, and that's where being demanding comes in.

I'm a teaching assistant, currently in Scotland but have done the same job in England. As far as I'm concerned most of us, most of the time, do the best we can - that goes for staff at all levels and also students. Most of my students are if not a delight then at least dealable with for the time I have to spend with them. But then you get a few who put so much energy into complaining about what we don't do for them that I can't help feeling they'd go up a grade or two if they put that into their actual work. For example, the lecturers all put some sort of notes online in advance - some go quite detailed, others just do the basic powerpoints. I got a complaint from a student that somebody hadn't formatted the notes with special little sections for writing comments. Another example - we're trialling a scheme for videoing lectures as podcasts. Staff can opt in or out of doing this - some are keen, some are not up for it. I suspect I would fall into the second category, having been scarred by the fact that at least one former student has a tape recording of me having a coughing fit. Anyway, one student decided it was terribly unfair that not all the lecturers made recordings. This is despite several years worth of her predecessors getting by without such videos...

But if the university is getting the same amount, how can students expect to get more? Don't understand this thinking.

Maybe because previous students didn't care, because they weren't paying, so you have a group of students who don't care what service they get, a university which gets money purely on the number of students it attracts. Poorly taught courses, poor facilities, bad service then continues because there's no incentive to change.

Of course transition times almost always highlight more faults - as the same number of students are there - doing inappropriate courses, with poor facilities, with lecturers who don't have the support or expectation to carry on their research in the new framework.

I went to uni in the olden days, we expected little, demanded nothing yet got a decent education and 3 years of fun.

DS went to one of the top unis in the country and had problems with courses cancelled at short notice because lecturers left but overall not bad.

DD went to another good uni (also top 10 in league tables) and although had great time found the uni inefficient and unresponsive.

I am doing a postgraduate course at a low ranked uni (previously a FE college) and am very glad neither of mine went anywhere like it as it is nowhere near the standards I would like to see

Having said that, I don't think any of us are demanding or entitled as you suggest some students are (we just go away and mutter in a typically british way)

i am a lecturer, and I don't think the students have changed much since my day (not that long ago).

If you went on to become a lecturer, chances are you were a very good student. And so what students were like becomes skewed in your mind

God they are keen these days

I went to as few lectures as possible and avoided my tutors for that very reason!

This is a very interesting thread, and I can see good points on both sides.
As a slight derail, I have got a part time job on the admin side at university, and this thread has made me a bit worried about it!
Any tips on how to avoid pissing off staff and students?!

My advice to any lecturers/supervisors out there would be to try to make yourselves as growly/unapproachable as possible. Also buy some tweeds and a velvet smoking jacket (or whatever the female equivalent is). Fill your rooms with many many books and a decanter of sweet sherry, which you should offer to any undergrad who crosses the threshold, whatever the time of day. When they ask you a question, stare into space for a bit, and then spout a random quotation at them and say "hmm?". Guaranteed they will not bother you after a while. Certainly worked for all mine.

When I went to university (in the late 70s and early 80s), a university education was a priviledge, not a right. There were fees (paid by your local education authority) there were grants (means-tested, so I got the absolute minimum) and you were most definitely NOT a "consumer".
These days it would appear that there is FAR too much "spoon-feeding" going on. My conclusion would be that the vast majority are actually not "bright" enough to benefit from a university education, so I would just sling them out.
Radical, yes, realistic, even more so.

Apologies as I've not read the entire thread. I feel that this is the culture we have created as a society for young people and see this every day as I am a secondary school teacher.

Many young people do not see that their learning as their responsibility - in their eyes, if they fail it has to be entirely the teachers' fault, and it does not cross their mind that it might be that they did not put enough work in. I have many conversations with my students about learning being a two-sided process, with the teacher facilitating and the student having to put in their own effort and work.

In schools today, there is so much 'intervention' put into place for individual students if they are not meeting their target grades - that they come to rely on this. We now have students who have been dragged through resit after resit at GCSE level to get C grades then talked into doing A levels, which they haven't got the independent learning skills to cope with. More students going to university with less independent learning skills, who have been 'spoon-fed' courses and dragged through endless resits to get grades - this is the result.