When a university is famous, it is usually so as a result of its internationally renowned research. However, for most universities, including my own, the main business necessarily has to do with the teaching we do, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, since it is through this core activity that we receive the bulk of our funding. Hence it is vital that we take teaching seriously and do it well. This is important for existing students, so they get good degrees and leave us with strongly positive feelings about the institution where they have studied; such outcomes also put our graduates in a good position to follow interesting careers. Moreover, gaining a reputation for good, caring teaching can also help us recruit future students, esesential for the continuing vitality of the university.
So what does it mean to be a good teaching institution, and to take care of our students?
Nowadays it seems to mean a great deal. First and foremost, we need good degree programmes, well taught and presented in a lively, interesting way. This, we have in abundance, I think, though of course what we teach is constantly under review and being updated. Then, as an institution, we need to show that we offer a good physical teaching environment, well resourced and with high quality facilities, and at least as good as our main competing institutions. This, too, my own university does pretty well these days. And as an added extra, we even have a lovely campus which is beautifully maintained, and some very good quality residences for those students who live on the campus. So far so good.
The last aspect of good teaching is probably the hardest, and has to do with our diverse personal contacts with students, whether these involve personal discussions about essays or larger projects; providing prompt and helpful feedback on students' academic work; giving advice about academic, personal and financial matters; responding to questions in lectures; responding to student e-mails (the main means of communication now); being available at predictable times for meetings with students; and probably others that don't come to mind as I write this. This field is hard to manage because the types of contact are so varied, and because it can involve such a big time commitment both from academics and support staff. But in terms of the sort of impression that our students get of our commitment to teaching, I suspect it is at least as important as the formal teaching that we do, possibly more so (especially for the more advanced students who tend to need more contact).
Luckily, I think my university does an amazingly good job in fostering good practice when it comes to our contacts with students. In some areas there are formal policies in place - either at university or School level, but in other areas we simply rely on the professionalism of staff at all levels to provide the responses and support that students need. My impression is that this part of our university system works really well - it stands up well both in national and international comparison, in my experience.
Taking all this together, we have a fairly complicated but effective system for delivering the 'teaching function' in my university, and I hope that we can hold onto it once public spending cuts start to feed through to the university sector in a serious way. Fingers crossed.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
Form filling - where will it end?
Universities are about the joys of learning and discovery, the creation and transmission of knowledge, and guiding students along their own personal educational journeys. At times, the research might go unexpectedly slowly, ideas might not come when they are most needed, but there are always students who need support, and watching them develop and mature during a degree programme is a wonderful process. This always keeps me going until the research starts to go better again.
Increasingly, though, our universities seem to be getting themselves bogged down in endless form filling - some of it mildly sensible, some of it quite silly, in my totally unbiased view. Let me just mention a few examples from my own recent experience.
First, research. A couple of years ago I secured a research grant to carry out a study of some development issues in Ghana (this was a small part of a much larger programme), and when my university first had confirmation of the funding, the very next e-mail I received said, quite bluntly, 'Paul, now you have this funding, you'll need to fill in a couple of forms'. Needless to say, I refused, and simply said that if the university wished to benefit from this funding it should not be hassling me with additional form filling. I heard no more about these forms, and still don't know what they were about. It evidently hasn't mattered too much, as the research was duly done.
Next, travel. Of course, we have to be accountable for what we do and how we spend public money, since we don't want to run into the kind of public opprobrium that MPs encountered in the past couple of years when some rather lax practices came to light. But in my own university we now have to fill in a form to get permission to spend, then complete an expenses form accompanied by receipts once the particular trip has been completed. The system works quite well, to be fair, but it does seem fairly heavy in terms of form filling. Moreover, each time we travel (especially overseas), we're supposed to complete some sort of risk assessment form for the university insurers. Personally, I've managed to avoid filling in these latter forms by always having my own travel insurance so I don't depend on the university.
Last, meetings with students. Whether at postgraduate or undergraduate level, it has always been accepted good practice to keep rough notes of significant meetings with students, especially when supervising dissertations, projects and the like. My own practice these days is to print out one of the recent e-mails between me and the student concerned, and then to scribble some notes onto that e-mail once the next supervision meeting has taken place. This rough and ready approach has served me well for many years. It's quick, simple and effective. However, now we are supposed to record such meetings on standard forms and even lodge copies in the School or departmental office. This seems to me way over the top, and largely a waste of valuable time. In fact the only reason I can see for doing this has nothing to do with keeping track of students' academic progress per se, but is more about ensuring there is a good paper trail in place in case some student decides to mount an appeal against their degree results. This is not a good reason for so much form filling, and I have not followed this new practice myself.
In fact by now the reader might perceive that I am not always a terribly cooperative academic. Where form filling is concerned, this is completely true, and is indeed one the reasons why I eventually agreed an early retirement deal with my university. On the other hand, where strictly academic matters are concerned, such as reading a colleague's new paper, advising colleagues about formulating a research grant proposal, or advising students about possible career paths, I like to think that I am closer to the other end of the scale - very cooperative, very collegiate.
Increasingly, though, our universities seem to be getting themselves bogged down in endless form filling - some of it mildly sensible, some of it quite silly, in my totally unbiased view. Let me just mention a few examples from my own recent experience.
First, research. A couple of years ago I secured a research grant to carry out a study of some development issues in Ghana (this was a small part of a much larger programme), and when my university first had confirmation of the funding, the very next e-mail I received said, quite bluntly, 'Paul, now you have this funding, you'll need to fill in a couple of forms'. Needless to say, I refused, and simply said that if the university wished to benefit from this funding it should not be hassling me with additional form filling. I heard no more about these forms, and still don't know what they were about. It evidently hasn't mattered too much, as the research was duly done.
Next, travel. Of course, we have to be accountable for what we do and how we spend public money, since we don't want to run into the kind of public opprobrium that MPs encountered in the past couple of years when some rather lax practices came to light. But in my own university we now have to fill in a form to get permission to spend, then complete an expenses form accompanied by receipts once the particular trip has been completed. The system works quite well, to be fair, but it does seem fairly heavy in terms of form filling. Moreover, each time we travel (especially overseas), we're supposed to complete some sort of risk assessment form for the university insurers. Personally, I've managed to avoid filling in these latter forms by always having my own travel insurance so I don't depend on the university.
Last, meetings with students. Whether at postgraduate or undergraduate level, it has always been accepted good practice to keep rough notes of significant meetings with students, especially when supervising dissertations, projects and the like. My own practice these days is to print out one of the recent e-mails between me and the student concerned, and then to scribble some notes onto that e-mail once the next supervision meeting has taken place. This rough and ready approach has served me well for many years. It's quick, simple and effective. However, now we are supposed to record such meetings on standard forms and even lodge copies in the School or departmental office. This seems to me way over the top, and largely a waste of valuable time. In fact the only reason I can see for doing this has nothing to do with keeping track of students' academic progress per se, but is more about ensuring there is a good paper trail in place in case some student decides to mount an appeal against their degree results. This is not a good reason for so much form filling, and I have not followed this new practice myself.
In fact by now the reader might perceive that I am not always a terribly cooperative academic. Where form filling is concerned, this is completely true, and is indeed one the reasons why I eventually agreed an early retirement deal with my university. On the other hand, where strictly academic matters are concerned, such as reading a colleague's new paper, advising colleagues about formulating a research grant proposal, or advising students about possible career paths, I like to think that I am closer to the other end of the scale - very cooperative, very collegiate.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Are academic standards rising or falling? And should we care?
At this time of the year we often discover that more and more of our students are graduating with a good honours degree, meaning an upper second or a first class degree. The share of such degrees in the total number of graduates has gone up over the past 2-3 decades, while the total student population itself has also risen massively. The question is, does the rising share of 'good' degrees mean that our students are on average better than they used to be; or that our teaching has steadily improved in quality and effectiveness; or perhaps that academic standards have declined somewhat? How can we tell which of these stories best fits the facts?
As an 'oldie', someone who has been teaching in universities since 1971, my instinct is to go for the third explanation, partly because many of our students seem to me less well prepared for university than they used to be - we never used to teach remedial English and maths, for instance; and partly because the incentives we face tend to push institutions towards awarding ever more good degrees. For all UK institutions, while pretending that published university league tables are 'unimportant', attach considerable significance to the outcome, and if they do well - i.e. get a high ranking and/or an improved ranking - do not hesitate to use it in their recruitment publicity. And one of the indicators that figures in most league tables is precisely this fraction of 'good' degrees mentioned above. Institutions always say they want to maintain academic standards, but they also want to do well in league tables, so you can imagine what happens in practice.
Now, it may well be the case that our teaching has also improved, with better training, more use of modern methods including ICT, and more diverse assessment methods, but personally I remain to be convinced that this has made such a big difference. Moreover, our restructured degree programmes and modularised teaching, while offering greater flexibility to students, has given rise to a culture of assessment by averaging marks across a huge range of courses. Averaging, of course, tends to push marks towards the middle, making it harder to fail, also harder to excel - but to counter that effect at the upper end (because we do want to give some firsts), we're all encouraged to mark quite generously at the top of the scale. The net effect of these different practices and pressures is to nudge average marks upwards.
The system of external examiners in the UK is supposed to confer some objectivity on all this by ensuring that standards in any given institution are not out of line with those elsewhere. But the examiners themselves come from universities experiencing just the same pressures, so without any ill intent or corruption they are able to confirm most proposed degree results with a clear conscience. Thus gradually improving outcomes are built into the system.
In response to these trends, there is a growing feeling in the UK that degree results don't mean what they used to, and it is being suggested that we should move over to a more complex US-type system, in which students don't receive a formal degree class at all (except perhaps for a few outstanding students). Instead, they would receive a detailed transcript, summarised in a GPA (grade point average). I imagine this might be helpful to potential employers of our graduates, but I'm not sure that it deals with the problem discussed here, to do with the 'quality of a degree'.
But how far should we be concerned about that? Two aspects of the question are worth highlighting here. First, we like to think that our degrees provide a signal to employers regarding the quality of our graduates, but employers frequently complain that many graduates are not well prepared for the world of work and lack many of the skills one would have expected them to acquire through a degree programme. There is a suggestion here that our degree classification system does not work quite as well as it allegedly did in the past, though hard evidence is quite difficult to come by.
Second, there is the issue of international comparisons. We like to think in the UK that we have a rather good university system, and we probably still do in many respects. But none of the incentives mentioned above pays any attention to the wider world. Yet we are operating in a highly competitive world economy in which many competing countries - such as Singapore, China, the US, South Korea, among others - are putting huge emphasis on raising standards in their universities, and here in the UK we hardly seem to notice this. Much of our system seems to me rather insular and inward looking, and as a result it often seems excessively complacent. It's high time we looked outwards for guidance on the academic standards we need to achieve for Britain to do well in the 'knowledge economy'.
As an 'oldie', someone who has been teaching in universities since 1971, my instinct is to go for the third explanation, partly because many of our students seem to me less well prepared for university than they used to be - we never used to teach remedial English and maths, for instance; and partly because the incentives we face tend to push institutions towards awarding ever more good degrees. For all UK institutions, while pretending that published university league tables are 'unimportant', attach considerable significance to the outcome, and if they do well - i.e. get a high ranking and/or an improved ranking - do not hesitate to use it in their recruitment publicity. And one of the indicators that figures in most league tables is precisely this fraction of 'good' degrees mentioned above. Institutions always say they want to maintain academic standards, but they also want to do well in league tables, so you can imagine what happens in practice.
Now, it may well be the case that our teaching has also improved, with better training, more use of modern methods including ICT, and more diverse assessment methods, but personally I remain to be convinced that this has made such a big difference. Moreover, our restructured degree programmes and modularised teaching, while offering greater flexibility to students, has given rise to a culture of assessment by averaging marks across a huge range of courses. Averaging, of course, tends to push marks towards the middle, making it harder to fail, also harder to excel - but to counter that effect at the upper end (because we do want to give some firsts), we're all encouraged to mark quite generously at the top of the scale. The net effect of these different practices and pressures is to nudge average marks upwards.
The system of external examiners in the UK is supposed to confer some objectivity on all this by ensuring that standards in any given institution are not out of line with those elsewhere. But the examiners themselves come from universities experiencing just the same pressures, so without any ill intent or corruption they are able to confirm most proposed degree results with a clear conscience. Thus gradually improving outcomes are built into the system.
In response to these trends, there is a growing feeling in the UK that degree results don't mean what they used to, and it is being suggested that we should move over to a more complex US-type system, in which students don't receive a formal degree class at all (except perhaps for a few outstanding students). Instead, they would receive a detailed transcript, summarised in a GPA (grade point average). I imagine this might be helpful to potential employers of our graduates, but I'm not sure that it deals with the problem discussed here, to do with the 'quality of a degree'.
But how far should we be concerned about that? Two aspects of the question are worth highlighting here. First, we like to think that our degrees provide a signal to employers regarding the quality of our graduates, but employers frequently complain that many graduates are not well prepared for the world of work and lack many of the skills one would have expected them to acquire through a degree programme. There is a suggestion here that our degree classification system does not work quite as well as it allegedly did in the past, though hard evidence is quite difficult to come by.
Second, there is the issue of international comparisons. We like to think in the UK that we have a rather good university system, and we probably still do in many respects. But none of the incentives mentioned above pays any attention to the wider world. Yet we are operating in a highly competitive world economy in which many competing countries - such as Singapore, China, the US, South Korea, among others - are putting huge emphasis on raising standards in their universities, and here in the UK we hardly seem to notice this. Much of our system seems to me rather insular and inward looking, and as a result it often seems excessively complacent. It's high time we looked outwards for guidance on the academic standards we need to achieve for Britain to do well in the 'knowledge economy'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
