Warnings at uni

[Wearywinnie]

My son has had 2 warnings over the past two years for poor attendance at uni. He has told me that if he gets a third they will kick him out. I am furious with him although he has been working much harder. Is it possible for him to get through another year without a single absence? Is it that simple? I don't know how the system works :(

My dd had a bit of a deadline pile up recently. She emailed her tutor to explain and he advised her to miss a couple of his lectures to catch up with herself and sent her the lecture notes.

I think like most things it's a matter of keeping people informed. They can't make allowances for you if they don't know what's going on.

But yes, the general trend is that good marks in first year can lead to a good end result so long as the student keeps working hard. And I totally agree that students need to accept that there may be some modules or assignments that they struggle with more than others. One 52 isn't the end of the world.

I'll tell dd, calamitously. I have been trying to explain that a disastrous encounter with a logic exam at Christmas does not mean a guaranteed 3rd......

Certainly it does not. I can sympathise with the feeling that all is lost, but one bad mark is just one bad mark. Most university exam boards take into account the overall pattern in a student's performance when determining degree classifications because we do want to be fair to students and not punish then for one mistake.

Thing is, it's easy for us to tell the students this but can be harder for them to take on board. Their marks are quite an emotional thing, and caught up with their hopes for the future.

Critical thinking can be a tough thing to get your head around, and many students initially struggle when there is no single correct answer for them to learn and regurgitate

In my broad field (humanities) the current A level syllabi do the students no favours in their preparations for university-level thinking. It takes many of them most of the 1st year even to start to understand how they need to work.

And oh, for them to understand that "wanting to get a good mark" is not the way to get a good mark. The best way to get "good" marks is to forget about marks and learn

Oh look, there are pigs flying past my office window!

Thanks for those replies. Quite encouraging. I'll feed them back to my daughter and tell her not to coast into 2nd year!

Also, tell her that (in most universities) first year marks don't count towards the final degree classification. Sometimes, this causes students to coast, but most are sensible and work hard as they like to see what they can achieve.

And further - most universities use some sort of way of measuring 'exit velocity' - the idea that a student may know more in second year than 1st year, and even more in 3rd year than in 2nd year. One place I worked at weighted 2nd year:3rd Year as 25:75 in calculating the final degree classification.

I'll ask how her university weights the marks for each year. I didn't realise that it varies from university to university. I hope they do count her first year marks though.

Exit velocity makes it sound like you are shooting them out from cannons...

If only we were allowed to shoot them out of cannons....

None of the universities I've worked at (or attended) have counted first year marks in determining degree classifications. It's always been a combination of the final two years with the final year weighted more heavily. This is both because students have learned more by final year, but also because the classes in the final year are at degree level, while those taken in first and sending year are at lower levels of study.

Nonetheless, your daughter can use the fact that she's learned enough in first year to get good marks to keep on learning and getting good marks that will be counted in the classification.

I agree that education at school does not serve students well in preparing them for learning at university. I don't think I've ever come across an academic who thinks that they do.

If A Levels are not serving students well in preparing for university, what else would you recommend that they do? (especially for humanities)

So far, we have thought of wider reading, EPQ and learning how to reference properly. Hope I am not bombarding you with too many questions (very nasty habit).

I think what the previous posters said are so v true. I can add an anecdote to it. A colleague was marking some essays and in the reference list was no less than 8 'readings'. So far not bad but not great. All of which were from a Wikipedia like website. It gets worse. There was even one which had the name of a famous/well established theory.. Via YouTube!

This theory is something that can be found in any standard textbook of that topic. So for example Maslows motivation theory. Except that the student referenced a YouTube video of someone lecturing on Maslows theory as opposed to reading the standard textbook on Maslow's theory.

In short I would suggest your daughter continue her curiosity in her subject, expand on it, join related societies or do jobs related to it... Read around it. Referencing and all that are relevant skills to have but I have a strong suspicion that if those students mentioned above were even remotely interested in what they are studying then there would have been some effort in doing some real research on the subject area.

These were third year students in a professional degree which if they went into would earn them a v decent package and a career trajectory. Oh and we are talking top 20 university.

littleham, off the top of my head:
Reading. Lots of reading. Primary sources and criticism. How do people in the field present their arguments, how do they write, what do they argue?
Learn to have an opinion and present it. Move on from the 'it could be argued' camp.
And sort out grammar and punctuation!

I agree. Reading, reading and more reading combined with writing skills. Not just grammar and punctuation (although, yes to both) but how to construct a paragraph, and how to build an argument out if coherently linked paragraphs. Summarising what they've read concisely and effectively would be useful to.

I'd like them to have learned to express themselves orally. Actual debating skills would be brilliant. It would be great if they had some idea about to develop an argument and the importance of evidence beyond their own thoughts and beliefs. Of course, some students do but we don't see many of them in my end of the sector.

I don't care about them coming in able to reference. It's much better that they come in and we teach them than that they arrive under the delusion they know how to do it (many if ours do, and it's harder to unteach the highly problematic pseudo referencing they produce than it would be to start from scratch). We assume they can't do it and teach on that assumption anyway.

If A Levels are not serving students well in preparing for university, what else would you recommend that they do?

Agree with all the others. Reading reading reading.

But I suppose for me, it's a matter of attitude and responsibility. I teach at a "top 10" so they tell me indeed, I've always taught in research-led universities, which get the A students supposedly.

Most of them are bright, and most of them are as committed as they can be to the course.

But ...

I don't think they know what real study & engagement mean. At admissions interviews (yes we interview) they tell me how engaged they are blah, blah, blah. But they get here, and it's an effort to get them to read beyond the set reading each week. They want to know which are the "right" books to read, half way through first year, they tell me they've not yet borrowed a book from the library. I had one young person last term tell me they couldn't do a scheduled presentation because of a consultant appointment. Fair enough. However, they informed me only 4 days beforehand, when they had had the dates for the presentation since the start of term. I was told "Oh I know which presentation group I'm in, but I didn't know when." THe information oabout times./topics for each group has been available to them since the first week of term. Apparently I was harsh to say to this student that "Anyone with the A levels to get into this course has the wit to work out when they are due to participate in a group presentation."

I get the "Oh but I couldn't find the book in the library, so I couldn't do any reading" as if there aren't tens or hundreds of other books on the subject they could have read (they have a 5 page single spaced list of "Suggested Further Reading" set out, topic by topic).

They email me on Boxing Day with a question about something that is clearly set out in the course document.

They whime to me if their tutor can't give them the "advice" they want: ie to tell them what to study, which essay question to do, and so on.

Most of them get on & do things, but it's the 10% of whiney ones who demand my time, as if I'm somehow their servant. And, I'm afraid, most of them have little idea or ambition about what they need to do as independent research -- for a final year dissertation, they're still finding stuff "off th internet" so they tell me, and think that a reading list of 10 items is enough to show "independent research."

They are so spoon fed at school, that most of them need me to tell them what they're supposed to be doing.

I was at one of the best universities in the world as an undergrad. We were given the run of an amazing library; we were given stimulating difficult courses, with starting point reading lists, and then we had to get on with it. It was wonderful!

But I doubt more than half a dozen of my students in each year group could cope with that now. They lack resilience.

It's not entirely their fault: they are examined to within an inch of their lives at secondary school, and in order for their schools to make the league tables & all that garbage, they are coached and cajoled, and spoon fed. They just don't have the experience of the real independence needed for humanities studies at challenging universities.

A lot of them step up, but an increasing number of students seek to blame academic staff teaching, for their own deficiencies in learning. I know that for most of them, this is not malicious -- they're nice kids, but they panic, they realise they're missing something, but they don't have the mental mindset to look to themselves: they project their anxiety & stress onto others.

Can you tell I've had 4 12 hour days, mostly seeing crying panicked students? Individually, I can't be this harsh with them; I have to work from where they are. But they are encouraged by all around them (and I see this here on MN) to demand from tutors what it is really not good practice to give them. It's sometimes a tricky balance between nudging them to where I know they need to be, and getting them to see that and take responsibility.

It's not that they don't have the talents & abilities to do it -- I am constantly delighted by the results when they do get it. But it's the system in which we are all trapped now.

I certainly think A level students are much more spoon fed than we were in my day.There are so many tailored resources at their fingertips that just weren't available in the 80s (or if they were i didn't know about them)

It is part of a wider trend of infantilising children
.We see it on Mn all the time.'AIBU to expect my reception child to have to walk half a mile to school or should I take a pushchair' 'AIBU to leave my 11 yr old home alone for 3 hours'

Yes, I can see why it happens. I just feel very sorry for these children, who then get pushed by dragons like me at university. I know most of them have the raw talent to do it, but they haven't all been given the tools to help themselves.

And I'm sure that school teachers see this as well, but again, are even more hamstrung to do anything about it.

I have the luxury that the ultimate bottom line is no-one has to go to university, and if they don't shape up they need to leave, or interrupt for a time. But universities are so run by the phantom of "student satisfaction" that it's increasingly difficult to push the students towards the mindset they need to have.

I'd argue that actually a level of student dissatisfaction might be an indication of a good hard intellectually tough education.

I think one important paradigm shift is the idea of what the point of any work is.

At school, pupil and teacher are engaged in a process of satisfying an external third party - the exam board. They work through the sodding AOBs, and draft and re-draft until they get where they want to be, and then send off/sit the exam.

At university, it's your tutor who's set the questions and is marking the work. So no, I won't read through your draft and 'see if you're on the right lines', because in that case I might as well just write myself an essay that I think is good. And no, if you don't like your mark, you can't submit again - instead, you take the feedback and apply it to the next thing you do.

And writers don't write "quotes" - they just write what they've written. You've quoted it!

Don't ask 'how many critics should I put in', or tell me 'I haven't put the critics in yet'. ;The critics' should be part and parcel of your engagement with what you're doing, not a thing you drop in from on high so you satisfy the AOB requirement.

At A level, lots of them had to 'memorise quotes' which they could pour onto the page in the exam - not so at University, so things you quote should be part of what you're saying, not 'evidence' for your 'PPE' or whatever acronym your school used. And they must be properly incorporated in your sentence.

"...Not necessarily. Sometimes a student will do shockingly in first year, realise that they seriously need to up their game and go on to do really well. I've known a student who was getting marks in the 30s and 40s in first year through total lack of effort and attendance who went on to come top of their class (with nearly 200 students on the programme)..."

This is reassuring, CalamitouslyWrong - ds2 has just started his second year of Applied Maths (in Scotland, so a 4-year degree) - and at the beginning of last term, he was called in by his tutor for a bollocking about his first year's marks and achievements - or lack thereof!

He had been lucky enough to get an unconditional offer, based on his Highers, and so had had a wonderful final year at school - he did lots of good stuff - helped out in classes, did some tutoring, played hockey and did hockey coaching, was a Drama Leader, and wrote and produced the school musical, and was available to help younger pupils who were having problems with certain subjects. All really character building and fun. But he didn't put the same effort into his school work, and didn't get good Advanced Higher results.

Unfortunately this did not stand him in good stead in his first year, despite us making it very clear that he now had to buckle down and get back to working. He struggled during the year, and because he was struggling and not doing well, he fell into the bad habit of doing more TV watching and less work - we only found this out last autumn, when he had the bollocking from his tutor, and was told that, unless he improved dramatically, and achieved a certain set of results, he would not be allowed to carry on and do Honours, and would get an ordinary degree.

His dad has sat down with him and worked out exactly how he needs to focus his efforts, to achieve the results he needs, and so far he seems to have pulled his socks up and is getting much better results than last year, so what you said, that I quoted above, is very reassuring - it makes me feel he can keep up this level of work, and that last year was the blip.

Maybe we took our eyes off the ball in his final year of school - we had no clue that he was slipping as badly as he did, or that his extra-curricular activities and prefect roles were being done at the expense of his school work. But once we did know this, we made it damn clear to him that his priorities had to be very different at University - sadly it took a year for him to learn this lesson.

Yes, yes, TheOriginalSteamingNit -- and this: At school, pupil and teacher are engaged in a process of satisfying an external third party - the exam board.

I'm a sad old-fashioned believer in education for the sake of cultivating a person to be the best they can be. Clearly I have to "get with the times." Education is about getting high marks, because high marks are really the aim in life.

Maybe we took our eyes off the ball in his final year of school

OTOH, it's his life & his education!

Thanks. It is very useful to be able to see things from your side of the fence. You ought to publish a book - Pet hates of university lecturers. It would be a best seller. I'd buy it!

She is fine with some of the things you have mentioned (reads primary sources, organised and independent) but has no real experience at debating. Sounds like it might be a good idea for her to join the debating society & look for other similar opportunities.

She says that the EPQ has been helpful - writing skills, independent research & constructing an argument. No one is sure what to advise regarding the referencing at the moment, so she has just taken a stab at it. Is there an advised format?

Fair point, UptheChimney. Maybe I am a bit too good at blaming myself for everything!

Littleham I'm facing the referencing issue with my own y13 dd at the moment - it's tricky, because the starting point for most referencing systems is how they deal with in-text citations, but they don't actually have to give page references for any of their quotATIONS (), so I'm not sure what to advise her about footnotes or bibliography.

SDTG - Chimney is right - he's a grown-up, it's his choices which are having an impact now and not your fault.

Chimney - wanna write that book?

I'd argue that actually a level of student dissatisfaction might be an indication of a good hard intellectually tough education.

Yes, in my field, the courses which have very high levels of student satisfaction are considered by externals to be easier than they should be.

Courses which are considered challenging, from where we as academics like to recruit PhD students, often have satisfaction scores on the lower end.

Sadly the latter are being pushed out, except at places like Oxbridge, which can afford to take the hit in their NSS satisfaction scores.