8 ms·

My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

50 points by IsaacL 11y ago

codexjourneys 11y ago
This is definitely a consequence of charging ridiculous tuition prices. £9,000 is not much compared with US tuition prices, either. Students have become customers, and I think it's absolutely driving grade inflation. If I were paying $30,000+ per year for tuition, I also would feel like a customer. It's a natural reaction and a highly negative outcome for academia, where rigor and curiosity should be main drivers instead of A's-for-pays. Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round. MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.
- ghaff 11y ago
  While the use of MOOCs to replace large lectures and focus on one-on-one and few-to-few interaction is eminently logical, this is something that's arguably been an option since the widespread availability of VCRs. I'm not quite ready to pronounce the death of MOOCs in the transform college education as opposed to a new form of vocational training yet but IMO we're pretty close. Whatever impact they've had on overachievers who may or may not have had access to traditional higher education, they have failed to broadly change education in any way and the major VC-funded examples haven't succeeded financially.
sklogic 11y ago
The idiots do not realise they're paying for a chance to learn, not for a product to be delivered to them no matter what.
- lmm 11y ago
  How would they? No-one's ever told them.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    If the school system was not that crippled they should have already known it in depth.
  - hyperliner 11y ago
    Certainly they have not been told by their parents.
- valdiorn 11y ago
  They are not idiots. If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. Schools should be free, but seeing how they're not, I see nothing wrong with students demanding their money's worth, and some slack if they fall behind on classwork. People should read Freakonomics.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > They are not idiots. They are indeed. > If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever. > Schools should be free, Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope. Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round? Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.
    - valdiorn 11y ago
      > > They are not idiots. > They are indeed. This is blatant ignorance.
yakult 11y ago
tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not only the (presumably) hundreds of students he has taught, but students, everywhere, in general. Having been a student myself, I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester. I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt. Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers. What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics. edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  Personally, I tend to downvote people who whine about karma. I can get enough of that crap on reddit. Someone can disagree with you without having to get into an extended debate. That's why the voting buttons exist.
  - emp_zealoth 11y ago
    No, that is exactly and perfectly wrong. Downvoting because you disagree is against the rules. As a student I wholeheartedly agree - I have classes now where a tutor comes in, tosses a two page pdf with an assigment in Labview (which we were never taught or even got to use before) to do during class and ITS GRADED right after that class. He also throws a hissing fit every time anyone dares to ask him for help.
    - pc86 11y ago
      I'm sure you've brought this behavior up with the professor though, right?
- 11y ago
relkor 11y ago
I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at matching students with explainations of concepts. If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the most productive decade of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me. If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere. [edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me > Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault? Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts: 1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term otherwise the student would not be there in the first place 2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional. 3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam) 4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?
- throwaway000002 11y ago
  You are absolutely right, but much like having a personal trainer, or a doctor who tells you to eat/exercise right, you have some responsibility in the matter. Moreover, if it were the case that less hand-holding helped produce a more market-valuable graduate, then you would rightly expect this. A lot of incentives in education are woefully misaligned, in my opinion. And I can't really see any simple obvious fixes, but entitlement to knowledge in the form of understanding on the part of students is not one of them. As Euclid is to have said, "there is no royal road to geometry".
- davidjgraph 11y ago
  From the article "teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload". Teaching at universities is virtually never their sole function, and rarely the majority of their function. At UK universities most such staff take the job for research and have to teach as a condition of that job. It's true that university staff vary in their commitment to teaching and I can remember many who felt that teaching was beneath them and a distraction from what they actually want to do. Unfortunately, this is the nature of academics, unless you have distinct research and teaching roles, this won't change (and that's another endless discussion).
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
There is a clear misalignment in the actual goals of the three core groups in universities: Administrators, Professors, Students. Administrators want to grow the school budget and increase prestige for themselves and the university. Professors want to do research and make an impact in their field, and to their peers. Students want to be able to get a job and have an interesting experience. In theory all three groups should have as a primary goal the expansion of the circle of knowledge [1] at some level. Administrators by providing a space for professors and students to do that, professors by partly focusing on students' needs and partly by having separate research periods and Students by expanding their own circles. Reality is, it's all about money, just like everything else. Each group is trying to get the most of it so they can do what they want individually. Everyone is a customer in this scenario. [1]http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- galfarragem 11y ago
  Clearly the less biased analysis in this thread. Thank you. tl;dr: Administration, students and professors are under high pressure and reacting accordingly.
- Overtonwindow 11y ago
  Excellent response. I went back to university for fun recently at a major research institution. I found that the administration wanted more money, and professors wanted to teach less and research more. Students bristled at the belief that a professors primary job is not to teach, but to research, while the administration continued to raise prices, and add pointless classes; do we REALLY need a 4 hour taught by a GTA lab twice a week on research methods in psychology?
balabaster 11y ago
I can see both sides of this argument. On one hand, when you pay £9,000 for an education, you expect to get exactly that - an education, not someone pointing you towards a bunch of information that you could have found yourself with half a dozen Google searches and the wherewithal to do dig through yourself... for free. It brings to mind a quote from Good Will Hunting: "you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" So I completely understand the mentality that when I pay you £9,000 for an education, I expect you to actively participate in educating me - doubly so when every student in that classroom is paying equally. On the other hand, I disagree with the sentiment that students feel like they are buying a degree. At least from my perspective, the degree itself is largely meaningless. It's the education piece I'm after. I am buying education via access to a pre-vetted, qualified and educated mentor that I can go to with all questions I have regarding my understandings and misunderstandings. I can do the learning piece myself, but I can't ask YouTube and online course material questions if I don't understand it, or to clarify my understanding of it... and I expect that as long as I meet my obligation to work hard to understand the material you are presenting me with and submit the coursework required for the course, I am indirectly buying that degree - and that withstanding, I expect to get the degree that I not only shed blood, sweat and tears for, but also paid £9,000 for. As a person, I also demand respect, not because I think the world owes me that, certainly not because I feel like I'm naturally entitled to it, but because I understand just as you do that we all have lives outside of the situation in which we interface. Sometimes those lives get in the way of our best intentions, some days trying to juggle those lives and get to work on time is all but impossible, and just as we are expected to afford respect to those around us, I expect the same affordance, no more, no less. So if my circumstances have prevented me from handing an assignment in on time, I expect some consideration for those circumstances, just as I am expected to afford the professor consideration for not attending class today because their real life prevented them from doing that, and you know what, given that I paid £9,000 to be in that classroom, I do feel like some respect should be given to that. As a lifelong student, watching the exponential increase in tuition fees and the attitudes of students towards educational systems and vice versa, I find it hard to blame the student. The education system is broken, tuition fees keep going up, the quality of education remains mediocre at best, through no fault of the professors who work hard and get pittance compared to what the university makes off the students. The media constantly bangs the drum of entitlement and consumerism into everyone from an early age; and the media is really just a product of the society that we began building in the 1950's... Guess what? Consequences.
UYChuH 11y ago
I'm doing my PhD in a Russell group British university. In one of our big group meetings someone asked about what was being done to encourage students to take theoretical CS courses, because after first year (when they're forced to take one) almost no students took them. When someone suggested we "go ask the students" the Profs and Lecturers shot it down saying "they'd only lie". I did go ask some of the undergrads and the reasons almost universally that the prof who taught it in first year was a harsh marker, bad lecturer, and that it wasn't worth losing the credit points in years two onward when they could get a better grade elsewhere and come out with a better degree at the end of it. The staff don't trust the students and the students want to make sure they get their money's worth; even if it means missing on some important stuff.
deleted 11y ago
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etiene 11y ago
Lazy people everywhere. Lazy students who can't be bothered to do something as simple as an assignment and then complain about it. Lazy professors who repeat the same lectures for over a decade, don't give any feedback and don't give a fuck about what the pupils are learning. In my university we don't even get to see the corrected exam we handed in. We receive a numerical grade by email and that's it. I have no idea what that meant. It's disgusting... :(
DanBC 11y ago
> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault? It's not surprising that students want to get a second opinion on grading. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht > More than 90,000 GCSE and A-level results were changed after challenges to grades awarded this summer - the highest on record. > The figures represent an increase of 17% compared with last year. > Results have a significant impact on both students and institutions, affecting whether or not pupils gain a university place and where schools appear in league tables. (GCSE exams are taken in school by 16 year olds. A level exams are taken in schools or colleges by 18 year olds, and are what is used to get entry to university.) EDIT: In 2013 there were 850,752 GCSE exams taken. So 90,000 incorrect grades is more than 10% - and these are just the exams that asked for a re-grade. When students have seen a serious error in their grades, or the grades of a friend, it's not surprising that they realise that just asking for a regrade could increase their marks.
jonathansizz 11y ago
My lectures are designed to supplement learning that my students are expected to have done prior to class. The lectures are a summary of the material, with worked examples, a chance to ask questions to clear up misunderstandings, and for discussion of key concepts. Lectures are attended by dozens of students, so they cannot be a personalized tutorial service. That's what office hours are for. My best students don't usually need office hours as they are pretty much self-taught, but the next tier down show up regularly and we sit down together and go through exactly the material they want to focus on in the detail they need. I tailor my pedagogy to these engaged students, not to the ones who expect to be handed an A for a minimum amount of effort. If you don't work, you'll deservedly do very poorly, and I'm not willing to waste my limited resources on you. And, no, I'm not going to curve your grade up either, because that's not fair on the good students. Unsurprisingly, poor students don't show up to office hours, don't take advantage of our free tutoring service, turn in material late, and regularly miss lectures. All these failings are entirely their own responsibility, not mine.
- relkor 11y ago
  Then change the fee schedule to reflect this. The problem I have is that your system does not serve 2/3rds of the customers. Your best students are pretty much self-taught, so why do you charge them for all of the your time. The poor students do not show up either, so why are you charging them for your time as well? I am not critizing your specific method of teaching, just your fee schedule. You admit that your services are basically useless to 2/3rds of the sutdents, yet you charge twice that of a personal tutor service for each and every one of your students. That is where the anger is coming from.
  - jonathansizz 11y ago
    I don't admit anything of the sort; you came up with the 2/3 figure. My best students are pretty much self-taught within the academic environment, which offers them a lot more than any series of MOOCs could. Maybe around 1/4 of my freshman students shouldn't be in university, and most of these leave during their first year. I'd be happy if admissions standards were increased, as it would be better for all concerned if individuals lacking the necessary ability and motivation didn't waste everyone's time as well as their own money. Once again, it is the responsibility of each potential student to determine whether they should accept a place at a university, not mine. As long as they're here, I'll give every student as much assistance as I can, but some of them can't or won't be helped.
sreenadh 11y ago
Its a sad state of this world where there is a price for everything but no value for anything. I have had my share of teachers who proved that "those who cannot do, teach". I read that in Sweden, you have to be in the top 5 percentile if you want to qualify as a teacher. Plus a lot of teachers are so disconnected from the professional world that the student are confused when I come to work which I have experienced myself and seem over again as an "intern-trainer" at my work as a Software Developer. Education has been so commercialized that some universities look more like a mall than a university. Cannot blame the students for expecting a degree after all the money they have paid. In a lot of collages, the entrance exam is just a scam. This state is specially true in India where we are taught to respect in the order of "Mother, Father, Teacher, God". Even God deserves less respect than teacher. But there also, if you cannot find any job. Then the next option is teaching.
Fiahil 11y ago
Each time I'm reading stories like these, I'm glad I avoided both sides of what's described here. Clueless students that takes everything for granted and will put the minimum amount of effort learning anything. And, the boring teacher who thinks classes are only an unimportant part of the mandatory stuff he has to do to continue doing what he likes. Where I've been studying, they removed the teachers, the classes and the grades (kind of). Learning is stimulated by peers and projects; correction and 'exams' are done by a computer (no negotiations with "unjust" grades, you failed == you failed); classes are optional and you usually don't need them to succeed on the projects. In results, you get interested people in classes when you explain something, and if you do your job well, they won't come to bother you after that. And from the students' side, you get motivated teammates that won't complain and try to help each others when you are crashing on a crazy deadline on a Sunday night at 11:42pm. Damn that was great. I wish it could be easily done with other fields and not only in software engineering.
zenir 11y ago
Giving a German view on that, where tuition is free: In Germany imho sometimes the problem is that professors don't really care much about the teaching, because they actually want to do research and teaching is just an nuisance for them. But that it is kind of okay, because you don't pay anything and you can always skip classes, as attendance is not mandatory. So basically if you don't learn shit in that lecture just go to the library or study at home (or do bbq in the park if you can afford it). Now, I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. I read somewhere that e. g. the MIT has a grades for their professors by the students and the professors get into trouble if their grades are bad. So from my viewpoint, students have the right to demand good teaching if they pay money. But this doesn't give you a free ticket for a degree (if you just can pay money to get a degree, the degree is not worth anything). A degree comes with after you have a certain knowledge in a field (not fully accurate, but that's about it). Professors should have to care of their students. It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. This is imho the cases for many universities (I'm especially talking about all the research paper print factories which call themselves universities). The article with the posters of the students is a typical example of getting problems wrong (by going to extremes).
- pc86 11y ago
  Context: I attended a small (1500 students, no grad school), private (read: expensive), liberal arts college from 2004-2008 and dropped out. I finished my degree in 2014 at the same institution because I was so close it was pointless not to. > I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a lot of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high. The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that the school actually received the $140k. They've got zero incentive to control costs. > If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point. > It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure. My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters. > If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :)
deleted 11y ago
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Overtonwindow 11y ago
I think she hit the nail on the head with this one. Students, especially my fellow Americans, seem to take university for granted. As a divine right, received not earned, and free from hard work, obligation, respect, and consequences.

50 points by IsaacL 11y ago

This is definitely a consequence of charging ridiculous tuition prices. £9,000 is not much compared with US tuition prices, either. Students have become customers, and I think it's absolutely driving grade inflation. If I were paying $30,000+ per year for tuition, I also would feel like a customer. It's a natural reaction and a highly negative outcome for academia, where rigor and curiosity should be main drivers instead of A's-for-pays. Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round. MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.

ghaff 11y ago
While the use of MOOCs to replace large lectures and focus on one-on-one and few-to-few interaction is eminently logical, this is something that's arguably been an option since the widespread availability of VCRs. I'm not quite ready to pronounce the death of MOOCs in the transform college education as opposed to a new form of vocational training yet but IMO we're pretty close. Whatever impact they've had on overachievers who may or may not have had access to traditional higher education, they have failed to broadly change education in any way and the major VC-funded examples haven't succeeded financially.

sklogic 11y ago

The idiots do not realise they're paying for a chance to learn, not for a product to be delivered to them no matter what.

lmm 11y ago
How would they? No-one's ever told them.
- sklogic 11y ago
  If the school system was not that crippled they should have already known it in depth.
- hyperliner 11y ago
  Certainly they have not been told by their parents.
valdiorn 11y ago
They are not idiots. If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. Schools should be free, but seeing how they're not, I see nothing wrong with students demanding their money's worth, and some slack if they fall behind on classwork. People should read Freakonomics.
- sklogic 11y ago
  > They are not idiots. They are indeed. > If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever. > Schools should be free, Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope. Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round? Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.
  - valdiorn 11y ago
    > > They are not idiots. > They are indeed. This is blatant ignorance.

yakult 11y ago

tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not only the (presumably) hundreds of students he has taught, but students, everywhere, in general. Having been a student myself, I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester. I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt. Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers. What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics. edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.

arbitrage 11y ago
Personally, I tend to downvote people who whine about karma. I can get enough of that crap on reddit. Someone can disagree with you without having to get into an extended debate. That's why the voting buttons exist.
- emp_zealoth 11y ago
  No, that is exactly and perfectly wrong. Downvoting because you disagree is against the rules. As a student I wholeheartedly agree - I have classes now where a tutor comes in, tosses a two page pdf with an assigment in Labview (which we were never taught or even got to use before) to do during class and ITS GRADED right after that class. He also throws a hissing fit every time anyone dares to ask him for help.
  - pc86 11y ago
    I'm sure you've brought this behavior up with the professor though, right?
11y ago

relkor 11y ago

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at matching students with explainations of concepts. If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the most productive decade of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me. If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere. [edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me > Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault? Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts: 1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term otherwise the student would not be there in the first place 2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional. 3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam) 4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?

throwaway000002 11y ago
You are absolutely right, but much like having a personal trainer, or a doctor who tells you to eat/exercise right, you have some responsibility in the matter. Moreover, if it were the case that less hand-holding helped produce a more market-valuable graduate, then you would rightly expect this. A lot of incentives in education are woefully misaligned, in my opinion. And I can't really see any simple obvious fixes, but entitlement to knowledge in the form of understanding on the part of students is not one of them. As Euclid is to have said, "there is no royal road to geometry".
davidjgraph 11y ago
From the article "teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload". Teaching at universities is virtually never their sole function, and rarely the majority of their function. At UK universities most such staff take the job for research and have to teach as a condition of that job. It's true that university staff vary in their commitment to teaching and I can remember many who felt that teaching was beneath them and a distraction from what they actually want to do. Unfortunately, this is the nature of academics, unless you have distinct research and teaching roles, this won't change (and that's another endless discussion).

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

There is a clear misalignment in the actual goals of the three core groups in universities: Administrators, Professors, Students. Administrators want to grow the school budget and increase prestige for themselves and the university. Professors want to do research and make an impact in their field, and to their peers. Students want to be able to get a job and have an interesting experience. In theory all three groups should have as a primary goal the expansion of the circle of knowledge [1] at some level. Administrators by providing a space for professors and students to do that, professors by partly focusing on students' needs and partly by having separate research periods and Students by expanding their own circles. Reality is, it's all about money, just like everything else. Each group is trying to get the most of it so they can do what they want individually. Everyone is a customer in this scenario. [1]http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

galfarragem 11y ago
Clearly the less biased analysis in this thread. Thank you. tl;dr: Administration, students and professors are under high pressure and reacting accordingly.
Overtonwindow 11y ago
Excellent response. I went back to university for fun recently at a major research institution. I found that the administration wanted more money, and professors wanted to teach less and research more. Students bristled at the belief that a professors primary job is not to teach, but to research, while the administration continued to raise prices, and add pointless classes; do we REALLY need a 4 hour taught by a GTA lab twice a week on research methods in psychology?

balabaster 11y ago

I can see both sides of this argument. On one hand, when you pay £9,000 for an education, you expect to get exactly that - an education, not someone pointing you towards a bunch of information that you could have found yourself with half a dozen Google searches and the wherewithal to do dig through yourself... for free. It brings to mind a quote from Good Will Hunting: "you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" So I completely understand the mentality that when I pay you £9,000 for an education, I expect you to actively participate in educating me - doubly so when every student in that classroom is paying equally. On the other hand, I disagree with the sentiment that students feel like they are buying a degree. At least from my perspective, the degree itself is largely meaningless. It's the education piece I'm after. I am buying education via access to a pre-vetted, qualified and educated mentor that I can go to with all questions I have regarding my understandings and misunderstandings. I can do the learning piece myself, but I can't ask YouTube and online course material questions if I don't understand it, or to clarify my understanding of it... and I expect that as long as I meet my obligation to work hard to understand the material you are presenting me with and submit the coursework required for the course, I am indirectly buying that degree - and that withstanding, I expect to get the degree that I not only shed blood, sweat and tears for, but also paid £9,000 for. As a person, I also demand respect, not because I think the world owes me that, certainly not because I feel like I'm naturally entitled to it, but because I understand just as you do that we all have lives outside of the situation in which we interface. Sometimes those lives get in the way of our best intentions, some days trying to juggle those lives and get to work on time is all but impossible, and just as we are expected to afford respect to those around us, I expect the same affordance, no more, no less. So if my circumstances have prevented me from handing an assignment in on time, I expect some consideration for those circumstances, just as I am expected to afford the professor consideration for not attending class today because their real life prevented them from doing that, and you know what, given that I paid £9,000 to be in that classroom, I do feel like some respect should be given to that. As a lifelong student, watching the exponential increase in tuition fees and the attitudes of students towards educational systems and vice versa, I find it hard to blame the student. The education system is broken, tuition fees keep going up, the quality of education remains mediocre at best, through no fault of the professors who work hard and get pittance compared to what the university makes off the students. The media constantly bangs the drum of entitlement and consumerism into everyone from an early age; and the media is really just a product of the society that we began building in the 1950's... Guess what? Consequences.

UYChuH 11y ago

I'm doing my PhD in a Russell group British university. In one of our big group meetings someone asked about what was being done to encourage students to take theoretical CS courses, because after first year (when they're forced to take one) almost no students took them. When someone suggested we "go ask the students" the Profs and Lecturers shot it down saying "they'd only lie". I did go ask some of the undergrads and the reasons almost universally that the prof who taught it in first year was a harsh marker, bad lecturer, and that it wasn't worth losing the credit points in years two onward when they could get a better grade elsewhere and come out with a better degree at the end of it. The staff don't trust the students and the students want to make sure they get their money's worth; even if it means missing on some important stuff.

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etiene 11y ago

Lazy people everywhere. Lazy students who can't be bothered to do something as simple as an assignment and then complain about it. Lazy professors who repeat the same lectures for over a decade, don't give any feedback and don't give a fuck about what the pupils are learning. In my university we don't even get to see the corrected exam we handed in. We receive a numerical grade by email and that's it. I have no idea what that meant. It's disgusting... :(

DanBC 11y ago

> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault? It's not surprising that students want to get a second opinion on grading. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht > More than 90,000 GCSE and A-level results were changed after challenges to grades awarded this summer - the highest on record. > The figures represent an increase of 17% compared with last year. > Results have a significant impact on both students and institutions, affecting whether or not pupils gain a university place and where schools appear in league tables. (GCSE exams are taken in school by 16 year olds. A level exams are taken in schools or colleges by 18 year olds, and are what is used to get entry to university.) EDIT: In 2013 there were 850,752 GCSE exams taken. So 90,000 incorrect grades is more than 10% - and these are just the exams that asked for a re-grade. When students have seen a serious error in their grades, or the grades of a friend, it's not surprising that they realise that just asking for a regrade could increase their marks.

jonathansizz 11y ago

My lectures are designed to supplement learning that my students are expected to have done prior to class. The lectures are a summary of the material, with worked examples, a chance to ask questions to clear up misunderstandings, and for discussion of key concepts. Lectures are attended by dozens of students, so they cannot be a personalized tutorial service. That's what office hours are for. My best students don't usually need office hours as they are pretty much self-taught, but the next tier down show up regularly and we sit down together and go through exactly the material they want to focus on in the detail they need. I tailor my pedagogy to these engaged students, not to the ones who expect to be handed an A for a minimum amount of effort. If you don't work, you'll deservedly do very poorly, and I'm not willing to waste my limited resources on you. And, no, I'm not going to curve your grade up either, because that's not fair on the good students. Unsurprisingly, poor students don't show up to office hours, don't take advantage of our free tutoring service, turn in material late, and regularly miss lectures. All these failings are entirely their own responsibility, not mine.

relkor 11y ago
Then change the fee schedule to reflect this. The problem I have is that your system does not serve 2/3rds of the customers. Your best students are pretty much self-taught, so why do you charge them for all of the your time. The poor students do not show up either, so why are you charging them for your time as well? I am not critizing your specific method of teaching, just your fee schedule. You admit that your services are basically useless to 2/3rds of the sutdents, yet you charge twice that of a personal tutor service for each and every one of your students. That is where the anger is coming from.
- jonathansizz 11y ago
  I don't admit anything of the sort; you came up with the 2/3 figure. My best students are pretty much self-taught within the academic environment, which offers them a lot more than any series of MOOCs could. Maybe around 1/4 of my freshman students shouldn't be in university, and most of these leave during their first year. I'd be happy if admissions standards were increased, as it would be better for all concerned if individuals lacking the necessary ability and motivation didn't waste everyone's time as well as their own money. Once again, it is the responsibility of each potential student to determine whether they should accept a place at a university, not mine. As long as they're here, I'll give every student as much assistance as I can, but some of them can't or won't be helped.

sreenadh 11y ago

Its a sad state of this world where there is a price for everything but no value for anything. I have had my share of teachers who proved that "those who cannot do, teach". I read that in Sweden, you have to be in the top 5 percentile if you want to qualify as a teacher. Plus a lot of teachers are so disconnected from the professional world that the student are confused when I come to work which I have experienced myself and seem over again as an "intern-trainer" at my work as a Software Developer. Education has been so commercialized that some universities look more like a mall than a university. Cannot blame the students for expecting a degree after all the money they have paid. In a lot of collages, the entrance exam is just a scam. This state is specially true in India where we are taught to respect in the order of "Mother, Father, Teacher, God". Even God deserves less respect than teacher. But there also, if you cannot find any job. Then the next option is teaching.

Fiahil 11y ago

Each time I'm reading stories like these, I'm glad I avoided both sides of what's described here. Clueless students that takes everything for granted and will put the minimum amount of effort learning anything. And, the boring teacher who thinks classes are only an unimportant part of the mandatory stuff he has to do to continue doing what he likes. Where I've been studying, they removed the teachers, the classes and the grades (kind of). Learning is stimulated by peers and projects; correction and 'exams' are done by a computer (no negotiations with "unjust" grades, you failed == you failed); classes are optional and you usually don't need them to succeed on the projects. In results, you get interested people in classes when you explain something, and if you do your job well, they won't come to bother you after that. And from the students' side, you get motivated teammates that won't complain and try to help each others when you are crashing on a crazy deadline on a Sunday night at 11:42pm. Damn that was great. I wish it could be easily done with other fields and not only in software engineering.

zenir 11y ago

Giving a German view on that, where tuition is free: In Germany imho sometimes the problem is that professors don't really care much about the teaching, because they actually want to do research and teaching is just an nuisance for them. But that it is kind of okay, because you don't pay anything and you can always skip classes, as attendance is not mandatory. So basically if you don't learn shit in that lecture just go to the library or study at home (or do bbq in the park if you can afford it). Now, I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. I read somewhere that e. g. the MIT has a grades for their professors by the students and the professors get into trouble if their grades are bad. So from my viewpoint, students have the right to demand good teaching if they pay money. But this doesn't give you a free ticket for a degree (if you just can pay money to get a degree, the degree is not worth anything). A degree comes with after you have a certain knowledge in a field (not fully accurate, but that's about it). Professors should have to care of their students. It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. This is imho the cases for many universities (I'm especially talking about all the research paper print factories which call themselves universities). The article with the posters of the students is a typical example of getting problems wrong (by going to extremes).

pc86 11y ago
Context: I attended a small (1500 students, no grad school), private (read: expensive), liberal arts college from 2004-2008 and dropped out. I finished my degree in 2014 at the same institution because I was so close it was pointless not to. > I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a lot of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high. The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that the school actually received the $140k. They've got zero incentive to control costs. > If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point. > It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure. My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters. > If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :)

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Overtonwindow 11y ago

I think she hit the nail on the head with this one. Students, especially my fellow Americans, seem to take university for granted. As a divine right, received not earned, and free from hard work, obligation, respect, and consequences.