To wonder WTF has happened to students?!

[CharminglyOdd]

I'm 25 and finished my studies (for good!) just over a year ago so have bits and pieces of uni experience over the last seven years. DP does some teaching at a university where they have a sister college in another town. Students at the uni who want to take his module have to travel to the sister college, which is vocational (they can combine the two). Some asked for a meeting and so he arranged to meet them at X cafe at 1730. I've just had a text from him to say that they didn't know where X cafe was (it's in our, and their, home town where the main uni is that they travel from every week) so instead of Googling it or asking him they trekked out to the sister town and have spent the last half an hour wandering around trying to find it. They are on their way back now to meet him and he's going to be very late home (he teaches one class and doesn't have an office before anyone suggests that).

There are other things that have happened, including requests for more clarification on assignments (which I have done, he has done, nothing wrong with that) but when they are not satisfied with the answer they email again, and again, and it becomes apparent that what they are really after is the answer to the question. A large proportion submitted assignments that failed the plagiarism software even though they knew the software existed and it's not got a low bar for detection AND they have plagiarism talks rammed down their throats (I know because I did and I got heartily sick of it)

Any other examples are too specific but, in all honesty, I don't think this many students were like it when I started only a few years ago. I wouldn't have pulled half the stuff they pull - I had too much respect for (most of!) my lecturers.

It's not the majority of students but still a pretty depressing proportion. I don't know how on earth they think some of this stuff is reasonable behaviour. And I'm pissed off because I'm hungry, he was due home ten minutes ago and it's eating into our time together (I work away, got tomorrow off so home early!).

And the cafe is on the main street and an independent shop so no branch confusion - in five years living here I've never met anyone who doesn't know it, which is probably why DP felt comfortable suggesting it.

Also, their Parents pone up and hound the life out of lecturers because their precious offspring aren't capable of speaking to their tutors themselves
AND, when we were students, we were POOR. Now, they create a massive queue in Costa... and Greggs... and Starbucks...and Tesco!

phone, not pone!!

I work at a university and mostly, it is because they are stressed. 25 is a lot older than 18. I am 33 and I know I did some dumb things as a student, through embarrassment or uncertainty. They are largely living on little money, working far longer hours in p/t jobs than used to be the case, student loans mess up their funding routinely, and they have the prospect of being launched into an economy where they have an increasingly small chance of a good job. They are just stressed and if you address that, they are mostly v reasonable.

If your DP is getting home before 8 he's doing okay IME.

Also you can't fail a plagiarism software detection test. It just finds similar material on the internet. But they might have legitimately quoted that material or cited it. It's only if they didn't actually credit the authors of the workwhich the tutor judges, not the softwarethat they are plagiarising.

He gets home before 8 but (no office) works until midnight. It's a good thing, funnily, that I work away in the week or it would totally destroy our home life. As it is he works 8am to midnight (or 1am or 2am) and then 'only' works a couple of hours at the weekend. His best friend is a FT lecturer and works just as hard but has an office so at least has a disconnect between the two.

It was uncredited work, they just copied and pasted to write the text, in some cases he found bits lifted from Wikipedia as well. If it wasn't DP telling me I'd think he was making it up as it's such a cliché!

I am sort of comparing my behaviour to when I was 18... I have three part time jobs and I did bombard my lecturers with questions especially the cute ones but I didn't expect replies late at night/weekends and I did read the assignments/extra information before asking questions, e.g. 'how long does it have to be?'

*have = had, thankfully/hopefully those days of baked beans and scraping mould off bread are behind me!

Maybe they just want their £9,000 worth (Not the plagarism bit)

So you've just finished your studies and now feel you are are able to judge the young school leavers that have just entered the system?
At 25 I think a thread about 'the young people today' coul wait, I dunno, maybe another 20 years.
Your poor dp though .

Plagiarism software flags word-for-word stuff - if it's a quote it should be in quotation marks (so not flagged), if it's not a quote it shouldn't be word-for-word.

Maybe... I certainly got hacked off when I realised that my £3000 was buying me the same lecture notes and textbook access (about three copies between 200 students) that previous free tuition bods had received. But that doesn't mean spoon-feeding, which is what most of them seem to want.

Neither of my parents went to uni and they brought me up to believe it was a privilege that you had to work hard for and you would succeed on merit. Aside from the massive political stuff that goes on within university staffing (which I had no clue about until I met DP and, by extension, his lecturer friend) that has bugger all to do with merit, I would like to think that holds true. Just a shame that it seems to be seen as a 'right' rather than something that's a right in terms of opportunity but must be worked for and gained on merit to complete.

That last is bad wording, but I hope you understand my meaning.

Lady I know, that's my point. I am still very young so I don't understand how they are so different.

It also makes me feel very Daily Fail, which I hate.

Sort of agree in that there is little initiative. However I do think students have tons of nitty bits to get sorted. We have stuff on 4 different computer sites that we are supposed to check regularly and post stuff on - all work differently. Every thing you ask is answered with" it's online" with very poor navigation.

The lecturers don't even use it properly either due to insufficient time or just lack of knowledge. Stuff is on their from years ago. Drives me mad. And then they bring in a new improved system...

There were probably plenty of dopey students when you were a whippersnapper though- you just weren't one of them!

OP I totally know what you mean. I'm 30, doing a post grad and some of the questions people ask!

My favourite so far is 'how many references should we have in this essay?'

These are post grads. They've already been through university once. It hacks me off that so much time is wasted on such nonsense.

Also they text and chat all through lectures and the library is so noisy I don't go there.

Ah yes, well lifting it from Wikipedia does happen. Those ones tend not to last long.

I think it's often that they are very, very scared of failure and they want to double-check everything. My students, at least, get massively wound up about failing and therefore wasting their nine grand and their parents hating them forever, etc. It seems to have raised the odds for them somehow.

So I do get students asking me 'obvious' questions but it's mostly because they are terrified of putting a foot wrong. I think they're largely over-assessed and over-stressed.

Some are just dozy, of course! But actually not that many.

I had second year criminology student the other day who thought that incarceration was when you set fire to yourself. We've only been using the word 'incarceration' for the last 5 lectures (and actually, the last three semesters...)

nope sorry completely agree with the OP who I am only a couple of years older than. We have students on placement with us on our team and they seem to expect to be spoon fed very basic stuff that with a little effort they can find out themselves. They are perfectly intelligent/ capable but have never been taught in a way that means they have to go and find things out for themselves.

boomting My undergrad degree was in Politics. In our second year, second semester someone asked in a seminar what a constituency was.

I agree RevoltingPeasant, I hope my ds gets someone like you when he goes to university in September.
He's a very clever but clueless teen, a bit dozy (aren't all teens?) but I know when it comes down to it he'll work his arse off.
I'm a single parent in a HA home with many periods on benefits, so maybe, the students the op is talking about have just had uni naturally coming to them.

I wonder how much of it comes from Internet culture. My age group (within a couple of years) are the narrow band who started their school careers without widespread Internet access but grew up with it as it exploded to become near-universal. If I ever take the time to reflect I do notice a sharp contrast in the way I problem-solve: my instinct now is to Google, even though I have the skills to find out elsewhere. When I need to use those skills I can, but if you were never taught them - as hatgirl says - you are lost.

You speak the truth OP. I am a lecturer and teach mainly at postgraduate level. I've just marked a number of take-home assingements. I am so sick of seeing quotations without page references, Wikipeadia listed as a source, inability to write an essay but instead a report with no paragraphs and sentences, etc..

Most of them haven't attended any tutorials or lecturers, or done the reading. Hence their assingements were very poor and I've failed them. Cue most of them coming back to me demanding to be "remarked", or explain my comments to them, pointing out how hard they've worked. I then have to spend an hour or more pulling to pieces their assingement in detail, pointing out that they basically have no knowledge of the subject and more is needed than paraphrasing a textbook and hoping somewhere in there they've answered the question! And I set problems which make them think and require very specific answers and references.

They seem to think now that because they pay fees directly, they can buy their degrees. The concept that work done = mark received seems entirely alien to most of them. Hence I would say that this country is now producing some postgraduates who pass their (taught) course at a lower standard than many first year students used to. I have to say its probably harder to get into university in the first place than pass the courses once there.

whateverittakes the numerous computer sites will be because students complain if you don't make copies of any information they need and make it accessible to them. Compared to looking up references in a library, I don't think checking 4 internet sites is that onerous really. They bombard you with emails at all hours of day, night and weekend, demanding immediate answers to information that is available online. And of course another thing that university is meant to teach you is how to look up material, carry out research in your own time and present it.

Parents contacting lecturers is another bugbear. That really is pathetic.

I sometimes get asked to provide a reference for a student; normally I err strongly on the side of generosity and give them a glowing one. However I must admit that I gave a less than glowing one to the student who emailed me constantly with pointless questions, including at weekends, including finding out my personal email address, all of which the answers to were available in the course materials. This student regailed me of how personal life made study difficult (although suffering from no specific or serious problems) and would make veiled threats that the students were going to take action somehow against the university for the course being badly run.

I would hate to employ someone like that - I can just imagine her being given a task at work and constantly hassling her boss at weekends to explain it further, give her more information, etc..

You don't know what it took for them to get there. You don't know what's going on in their lives. You don't know them. Whatever happened to being charitable and giving people the benefit of the doubt? Well done to everyone who has never made a mistake, never asked a stupid question and never got lost. The rest of us are just muddling along the best we can.

I work at a university (not as an academic) and as with all groups of people there are brilliant students and clueless ones.

I met two today who started a business in their second year and are now turning over £28k a year, with a major corporate interested in their idea.

I also met a girl who didn't know charities actually paid people to work for them