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 :(

Uilen I had picked up on this:

"There is very definitely dumbing down going on at universities which parents on Mumsnet perceive as the best universities outside Oxbridge."

I may be wrong but I was assuming most people would see some London Universities with a small number of others depending on subject and often starting with Warwick, as the best Universities outside Oxbridge. My impression is that world ranking is simply too important to let this happen.

I doubt that the number of firsts reflects students working harder, indeed I expect a lot of it is as a result of employers demanding that applicants have 2.1 or better. You can't take a decent student's money and then close the door to future graduate employment.

That said the world is much more grade focussed and our DC have been almost tested out of existence, especially with AS levels on top of A2 and GCSE. A good proportion work hard, though obvously its impossible to say whether they work harder than a previous generation.

I don't think I was intending to extrapolate too much from DS' individual expeerience, other than to remark that I have been surprised at how hard he is expected to work. TBH I think he is as well. As I posted earlier DH's Oxford tutor complained in his recent retirement speech that a lot of technical content that was formerly in a Masters Degree is now part of the UG degree, though this may simply mean different (more science, less social) rather than more work. DS is certainly covering stuff in his first year that I covering in my second or third years. He also says that some of his Oxbridge peers have even more. For example, a friend, having tried, claims its well nigh impossible to do all the work set even for first year Law.

DS, I think is Ok, but others not expecting the workload and relying of parents' tales of skipping lectures might find it all a bit of a grind.

My guess is that though some of this pressure will come from a University keen to maintain their world rankings (China's ambition is to have 100 Universities in the world's top 500 within a reasonably short time frame - the competiton is growing) quite a lot will come from overseas students sent here on "family scholarships" whose aim is to work in order to widen international employment opportunities, and who won't be particuarly interested in other aspects which might support "student satisfaction".

At the parents induction talk, the response to a question about low student satisfaction was that this was as it should be. They had educated their students to be a demanding and critical bunch!

Sometimes if you miss only 3 lectures/classes you fail the module - this happened during my degree

So you think that Bristol or Durham can't drop their undergraduate standards because of international competition? That Imperial physics is as hard as it was 20 years ago?

I think there are a number of flaws to this argument. All over the world academics feel that school standards are dropping and undergraduate standards are falling. People don't actually choose undergraduate programmes on how hard the content is but based on the overall reputation and employment prospects. E.g. when I taught at a top Ivy League university a decade ago the students there (in maths classes) were not remotely comparable to Cambridge students due (at least in part) to the different criteria used for entry. The classes were taught at a very different level and in a very different way to the "other" Cambridge. Professors there would complain that they had to dumb down to teach the current generation of students, and this was born out when one looked back at earlier years exams and assessments.

In my own subject what used to be taught at undergraduate level has now been moved to the masters programmes, not the other way round. Even at Oxbridge I would say the amount of content is a bit down on what it used to be. Of course there will be variations by subject and maybe subjects such as law are different.

World rankings are based on large number of factors but the strongest component in world rankings is always going to be research rather than teaching. I have been at a (non-UK) top 50 in the world university with very strong research where the teaching was and is awful, by all measures, but this doesn't show up in the world ranking league tables nor did it affect the stream of international students going there (because of the top 50 position). In my opinion UK universities barely breaking the top 100 or 200 in world tables are teaching at a higher undergraduate level than this place is.

Students from certain countries do indeed work incredibly long hours but they did twenty years ago as well. I am always surprised how little UK students work (on average) and how little they seem to be affected by the students from abroad. It is quite common for UK students to say to me in tutorials that they know that students from Asia work really hard and get high results as a result, but they don't want to do the same, it would be unreasonable for them to be expected to work most evenings and weekends.

Perhaps Universities are at a point of divergence. DS' University talks a lot about its international standing. It is also the University where UK Government funding forms the lowest proportion of its overal funding. And somewhere with one of the highest proportions of overseas students.

Way back, when I did my degree, I was the only British student on my course, so mixing with overseas students was pretty normal but as you suggest, the really hard working students kept to themselves or we kept away from them. Now the proportion of overseas and non-UK EU students seems to have grown, as has the number of first generation British students who to some extent socialise on an ethnic rather than nationality lines. All a rather clunky way of saying that working long hours seems to be the norm, and that British (or indeed students from elsewere) who are engaged in their course, and perhaps less interested in an athletics/SU/student bar centres of gravity, may find themselves naturally gravitating to mixed and quite hard working groups. London schools are so international that DC emerge with far less sense of a difference between the British and "foreigners", and presumably the same applies to students growing up elsewhere in the world. So students mix better and the prevailing work culture seems to have shifted.

I'm not sure I have a strong view, as it is up to DS. However after three years of public exam grind I can see some advantage in him taking his foot off the pedal this year.

I dont really understand why academics across the whole world feel standards are slipping, but don't know enough to comment. However from what I have witnessed in terms of the London part of the Ivy League application hurdle race, it is not a system designed to pick up the most interesting or academic. Plenty of mini-renaissance children who are coached, tutored or trained to the nth degree so that they shine at art, sport, music and more. Up to three years practicing for SATs, and then several attempts, hands up first for any school leadership position, and and and. This is obviousy not true of all, however from observation the very bright, ie those that find A2 Further Maths a breeze, seem to have opted for the more specialized UG degrees found in the UK.

I am a bit surprised to hear that Imperial's physics is slipping, though really would not know. For economics Durham was not really on the radar. The top four are fairly well defined. Bristol's habit of giving out contexturalised offers was a bit off-putting, even if the reasons behind are understood. If you get an A* in further maths and know they may be letting some students in with an A in single, or perhaps even a B, there is a fear that much of the first year will be spent covering old ground. We know some really good students who ended up at UCL or Imperial for Engineering, and the grades required for Computer Science were really tough. And from observation, competition for overseas student places at Cambridge in quantitative subjects seemed really tough, with a lot again going to Imperial.

Another anecdote. I have two lovely, and rich, Chinese students as tenants in a rental property. They took a well established route of Concord/Cardiff sixth forms, maths at Imperial followed by a Masters. They giggled when I told them that DS had started at LSE, had taken Further Maths A2, and was now spending the greater part of his time studying maths. They claimed not to have realised Caucasians were capable of understanding maths. Presumably in all their years of study they had come across very few. It is also very obvious that after six years in the UK and they had barely touched the sides culturally, or indeed liguistically. Still they are spending a fortune in London shops, and are subsidising home student's University fees.

I wouldn't describe Imperial's physics standards as slipping - they had to adapt to changes in school standards and therefore undergraduate physics is a bit easier than it was 20 years ago as they spend the first year teaching what used to be school material. (This is not a comment specific to Imperial nor a criticism of them.)

Generally the highest scores in undergraduate maths programmes in the UK are not achieved consistently by any particular ethnic group so I am surprised that Chinese students would think this. (I personally have seen a lot of top students from Imperial maths, most of whom were European or North American.) Average scores do vary between different ethnicities and nationalities, with the UK student averages sometimes being brought down by students who aren't working. However, at the top end, the highest scores are achieved by a combination of work and ability; hard work alone does not produce the top scores in maths. In my own university there is more concern that the top scores are almost always from Caucasians i.e. is there unconscious bias in the papers?

Uilen,

I too would expect to find a range, perhaps say with a slight over-representation of nationalities, like Hungarians, who seem to value maths.

My anecdote was perhaps only an illustration of how isolated some groups can be within the British academic system, backing up your suggestion that work ethic does not always flow from one group to another. I think it is perfectly possible that neither girl has made any friends who are not Chinese. Which is not being Chinese, but more likely the fact they come from a small town in the middle of China and will be the first generation educationed overseas, are very rich so distanced from others, and are probably not motivated to join societies etc.

DS seems to have found a middle ground where a mix of nationalities meet through societies or through their subject. He's picking up on the work ethic of others and, I hope, is contributing something useful from his own upbringing. I suspect this might happen in London more than elsewhere, though Oxbridge seems to achieve good integration of its diverse student body. I assume this is why his University is firmly towards the top of many employer recruitment lists. And why students like OPs son really need to think abbout they they are at University and what they want to achieve.