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Due to student satisfaction. It should be noted that Scottish students don't pay (significant) tuition fees.
by bencollier49 5y ago
Due to student satisfaction.
It should be noted that Scottish students don't pay (significant) tuition fees.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoOnly if you're Scottish though, if you're English, Welsh, or Northern Irish you still have to pay full fees.
- bencollier49 5y agoGood point, but with 30% of the students there from Scotland (more than three times the UK population average), I'm guessing it's a factor in satisfaction ratings.
- n4r9 5y agoAs a former lecturer, I found that student satisfaction often came down to things like how "easy" the lectures are. Big name universities like Oxford traditionally haven't (until recently?) felt the pressure to hit these objectives since they can ride on their reputation.
- andrewingram 5y agoWhat do you mean by easy in this context?
- Jensson 5y agoStudents are happier with courses they get good grades in. Students who fail aren't very happy.
- n4r9 5y agoGood question, it is slightly nebulous but to do with how much the course requires students to deeply understand the underlying concepts, and how much independent effort it asks of them. For example... Easy: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students do a very similar example (e.g. both matrices have lots of zeroes in the same cells). Harder: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students do a matrix that is structurally very different. Hard: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students extend the ideas of the algorithm to a specific 4x4 matrix. My own undergraduate experience was largely in the "hard" category, whilst as a lecturer at a different university there was pressure to move increasingly towards the "easy". It was even fairly explicit: student feedback surveys would be aggregated and you'd be informed that the students are unhappy because the tutorial exercises cover things they "haven't seen" in lectures.
- bencollier49 5y agoI friend of mine was a lecturer, and she set exams and tasks which explicitly tested the students' understanding of the material she was teaching, as you would expect - scores for her tests followed a bimodal distribution - indicating that they were working. She got terrible satisfaction scores, and got pressure from 'higher-ups' to reweight the exams so the people in the "fail" group passed.
- todorus 5y agoI'm not sure how to read this. I could interpret the bimodal outcome as the initial skill of the student being the main factor. Either you get it, or you don't, and the lecturer had no real influence on the outcome. The reweighting is not a good solution, but I would ask questions to the lecturer why a good chunk of her students are failing. It's her responsibility to teach them after all, and not to filter out the elite.
- padthai 5y agoBefore Brexit it was free for all the EU/EEA/CH... but not for England, Wales, Norther Ireland. I always though it was quite fun detail.
- notahacker 5y agoRecent student satisfaction is also going to be heavily influenced by Covid. It's not difficult to imagine that Oxbridge students are less satisfied with many of their interactions with professors being moved online than students at other universities...
- cafard 5y agoIt can be an economical option for American students. A young woman from my neighborhood in Washington, DC, just finished here degree there.