To expect my students to show a teensy amount of initiative?

[dontrunwithscissors]

I'm an academic in the Humanities. I'm currently teaching a third year class & they're driving me mad. (I work in Scotland so their degree results are based on grades in years 3 and 4.)

In order to make life as 'easy' as possible, the tutorial reading is either available digitally or I provide a photocopy. They're usually expected to read 40-50 pages so hardly a huge amount.

At the start of the semester, I warned them that there had been some issues with the digitisation license and that it was possible that some materials may end up not being available. I also explained that I don't get any notice in situations like this & to let me know straight away if there were any problems.

So, it turns out that the main text for today's class has disappeared from the digitised texts. The only person on the course of 23 students emailed me to tell me at 4pm yesterday. Class is at 10am today. There are 3 students giving class presentations today that's worth 15% of the final grade

AIBU to expect students to have bloody well pulled themself together and 1) attempted to access the reading earlier; 2) highlighted the problem earlier. I'm particularly shocked that none of the people presenting this week figured to ask for it.

I'm pissed off with students being 'babied'. It gets worse by the year. They want everything on a plate and go running to mummy and daddy when they don't get the 2:1 they assume they will get. They can't be arsed to read (keeping in mind that this is a humanities degree so reading widely is a basic requirement.) Ive even had notes from parents explaining that their snowflake should be allowed to submit work late becauSe they're not good at planning or had to go to a wedding...

Apologies for typos. I'm on my phone + on the bus n

I think teachers teach to the test for A Levels, because of the awful league tables and other crap successive governments hand out to schools.

Good, deep learning, which results in cognitive shifts, is hard, it's difficult, it takes time and resilience. Not things that we can necessarily rely on schools to teach any more, because they have so much else to do.

I just didn't see the point of doing a reading that would let benefit my essay?

And there we have it folks - welcome to our future leaders - because why should they do anything that doesn't benefit them directly?

Right, I'd better get back to marking. Giving a page of clear, personalised feedback, with constructive comments on what worked, what didn't and what could be done to do better next time.

I wonder how long this batch of essays will languish in the office until we chuck them out in a year's time? (hint: usually around 30% of essays are never picked up by students)

I'm sure the young student wasn't making it up. Plus I imagine that the golden mile law firm saw a bright young person, and snapped them up!

Andfaraway

I was suffering from severe suicidal depression in my third year. I HATED my degree with a passion (I should have dropped out in first year but I didn't because of the money involved already.)

I did the minimum to get myself through the degree.

I did a humanities degree in a good uni right after my A levels. I was definitely on the lax side with reading/ lecture attendance and did pretty much all the work last minute, still got a 2:1 though.

But when I look back I can see how much more I could have got out of it if I had read properly, really engaged with the seminars etc. In hindsight I should have taken a gap year to get a bit more life experience and self confidence before doing my degree, have a chance to miss learning and work up an appetite for it.

I remember uni as a time where I grappled with personal issues (what kind of person I was, who I fit in with, why everyone seemed more interesting and confident than me) rather than academic ones.

As a teacher myself now I can see how frustrating it must have been for my uni teachers when I/others didn't engage properly. But TBH surely an element of that is inevitable when working with young adults. OP, do you think it is worse now than 10/20 years ago?

I did the minimum to get myself through the degree

Surely that would have resulted in a pass or third?

I got a high 2:1. I don't know why. It was English - I chose to write essays on books I'd read and enjoyed.

You really didn't need to do much work to get a 2:1 (in my opinion).

I think the entire year passed with a 2:1 or first bar a couple of people.

Bearing that in mind, do you or your contemporaries value your qualifications?

I chose to write essays on books I'd read and enjoyed.

So you did do the reading then.

To an honest I don't really think I deserve my degree. I think my lecturers would agree.

With regards to the fees- they definitely made me feel trapped. I couldn't quit because I'd invested so much money.

I'm from a (failing) state school back ground and found the whole university experience a horrendous culture shock.

I think the entire year passed with a 2:1 or first bar a couple of people.

Fucking hell! I did life sciences at a redbrick in the mid nineties. I reckon the number of students getting 2:2s and 2:1s was about the same, with a few firsts and thirds at the extremes. You know, a typical bell curve distribution. Sounds like there's been a bit of grade inflation since then. My Dad read engineering at Oxford back in the day, and he said the only people who got firsts were genuine geniuses - e.g. Stephen Hawking (though he did Physics).

Is this just a British problem or does it happen elsewhere?

I teach English in an Italian university and recognise these problems. It is not obligatory here to attend the lessons before you take the exam but you would think that the student should at least try and find out what the exam is about before attempting it! Some of my first year students have failed the exam several times but do they come and see me to find out WHY they have failed - do they heck! I always insist that anyone who fails (or indeed passes) should come and see how they did but most don't bother - just like they don't bother to pick up essays that I have marked. I have also had students turn up with their parents as if they were back at school....

The proverbial biscuit goes to a student who sent me some work to mark last week - which is part of my job description and I am happy to mark work but strangely this was not a piece of writing I had set. When I asked him what it was it transpired that HE was giving English lessons and had asked his student to write it - but given his own poor level of English he was passing the essay on to me to correct!!

I'd read a lot of the primary texts before my degree.

But I had to be selective with my essay choices; a lot of the questions were on books/poems/plays i had never touched.

Occasionally I read something new, but I usually skimmed it and then looked it up online.

velour - I am absolutely not saying that students are braindead. This is not about intelligence at all: I think students are as bright as ever! Nor is it about slagging students off - as I said, I actually worry that many of them are pathologically anxious about their progress and their work, and that this leads to a risk-averseness and a shying away from the kind of creativity that university ought to be about. And I'm not saying it's their fault either: it's partly about parenting, it's largely about schooling, and it's perhaps also about an increasingly managerial bums-on-seats culture. I wonder if there are also problems connected with a culture of infinite distractions these days, which make it much more of a challenge to commit to the kind of one-eyed focus that really yields results.

There are also things that you simply can't get from contact hours. Research skills, for instance, which are of tremendous use in a lot of professions. Also, amazing happen in our interactions with this technology called 'the book' - a lot of the highest level intellectual development in terms of critical thinking happens between the person and the page. There is no classroom substitute for committing to understanding a difficult work: you simply cannot deliver in a one-hour lecture the complexity that you can deliver in book that takes 16 hours to read. Students absolutely cannot and should not grasp a difficult thinker secondhand. There is no substitute for that experience of a primary text. Lectures should be about shining a light on a few aspects to help a student through, not starting at page one and giving some awful kind of simplified summary.

You should enter and leave university a different person: and that's not just about your subject knowledge. I'm not sure that many students do now, and that makes me really sad.

I barely read any of the critical theory. I just picked essay titles with a feminist focus because I am widely read around that area from personal interest.

I'm sure there are lazy students who don't do the prep. I'll admit that 20 years ago I probably didn't do all the reading I should have. I was more focused a few years later when I had to pay for my own Masters.

But I don't think the 'customer' attitude is all bad. Certainly at undergraduate level (less at postgrad) a significant proportion of our lecturers showed little interest in teaching us or making lectures engaging. Reading out old notes in a monotone was pretty common. It was plain as day they just wanted to do their research and having to teach was an unwanted distraction. We just put up with it. If students today expect better than that then good for them.

sorry to hear about your third year Virginia and well done for getting such a great result in those circs, you should be proud.
Your first post was a bit disingenuous though. It's not even possible to get a third on the basis of turning up to seminars, we barely scratch the surface of the research you need to do for an essay. Your other posts make much more sense.

You should enter and leave university a different person: and that's not just about your subject knowledge. I'm not sure that many students do now, and that makes me really sad.

I agree, both my daughters have achieved this.

CorBlimey

There is probably a balance to be made. Holding instutions to account because of poor quality lecturers, lack of access time to tutors or unsatisfactoy facilities is one thing, but there does seem to be a certain expectation from a number of students to have all course content spoon fed to them on nice easy to digest handouts and for the lectureres themselves to be ‘entertaining’, seriously how to you make a fluid dynamics or soil mechanics lecture ‘exciting’. There was someone up thread moaning about the trauma of having to go and find their own texts from a reading list, the horror, they actually had to go to the library and flick through a book! At the end of the day we are talking about young 18-22 year old adults, old enough to vote, drive a car, get married join the army and kill people, not kids. I think a sizable minority of students need to take the lead, show some inititive and stand on their own two feet.

I work in a chemistry research lab at a University and am currently having these problems with my final year honours project student. She completely lacks any initiative and ability to work independently. She is also riddled with anxiety. She is actually a lovely girl, and is capable of the work but is completely clueless about how to apply herself. I have had many project students before and they vary a lot, but there has been a steady downward trend - not in inteligence, but ability to do the work without being hand held.

I teach in an ex-poly. I used to teach in a Russell Group uni and I honestly think that the standards we expect from students are higher here, at least at undergrad level.
Some further observations:
-students have much higher lifestyle expectations now. Their studies are affected by the amount of hours they work in their jobs which affects their attendance. But this isn't just to live, it's to live in a flashy flat in the centre of town and spend their holidays travelling or popping over to New York for a long weekend. They don't seem to accept that being a student means being skint for 3 years. There has been a lot of new, privately run Halls built to replace basic uni halls so in first year they all have en-suites with wifi etc. included.
-they also have huge levels of anxiety and depression, our counselling/ support services are struggling to cope.

The worst ones echo everything said so far. They don't attend and expect us to do all their thinking for them.
-Having not attended any of the seminars where extensive help has been given on how to do their essay, they expect to give us a draft and for us to tell them what they need to do to it to get a 2:1.
-When they get 55, they instantly put in a complaint about their mark without having picked up the feedback. They try to bully and intimidate staff into giving them better marks by threatening to give poor feedback on their unit questionnaires and the NSS and put in a complaint about how their bad mark is because of your poor teaching.
-They have an instant gratification approach to information and lack initiative to find anything out themselves e.g.. tagging us on Facebook at 1am to ask for the email address of a tutor, which they could find out from the website, the handbook, or googling the name.

I rarely have to deal with parents but when I do, it is generally because there are family problems / mental health issues and they are concerned about their kids' welfare. I'm happy to talk to them with the student's permission as family support is so important.
I rarely encounter the type of parent mentioned above - which possibly explains why most of our students know how to take responsibility for themselves. They are more likely to say 'Dear Dr. X, My son can be lazy and disorganised, please let me know if he isn't attending and I will kick him up the arse'. Only 1 instance where a parent has kicked off: "My son would never plagiarise, he's a Buddhist" is an email which went in our 'special' folder.

Having said all this, for every lazy, demanding unengaged 2:2 student who thinks they are entitled to a 2:1 there are 10 who are engaging, keen to learn and just generally lovely. It is a joy to be in a room with them for 2 hours. If they get a disappointing mark, they take it on the chin and listen to the feedback so they can improve next time.
Given the research pressure, pointless bureaucracy and generally fuckwittery of university management, it is the students who keep me doing this job.

I was amazed when I looked at student accommodation recently - it seems so luxurious to what we had (one shower and two loos per corridor or 12 people!) However, I recently went back to the Italian hall of residence that I stayed in 20 years ago on my Erasmus year and it hadn't changed at all.

Youremywifenow - "I teach in an ex-poly. I used to teach in a Russell Group uni and I honestly think that the standards we expect from students are higher here, at least at undergrad level.'

I wouldn't disagree with that point of view. Having had experience in both types of institution the issue is the race to the bottom. Its about bums on seats to maximise fees regardless of the quality of students. Some Russell Group unis have basically opened their doors to anyone that can pay and put on courses which have no value just to get students through the door.

An ex poly with a highly regarded course and limited places might very well have better students in that environment and invested in better teaching infrastructure.

I think you are being a little unfair. I work in a university but I am not a lecturer. I am aware that some students who are a little lazy and blame everyone else around them when things go wrong. However there are other students who work very hard. We have a lot of mature students, many have children and are working at the same time so perhaps might not have had time to do things earlier. It's not their fault that there is a problem with the digitisation licence and the readings have disappeared all of a sudden.