It’s been more than a month now since thousands of fresh-faced young students began their first year at university, full of excitement, confidence and hope. Poor souls. I felt that way at first, but it didn’t take long for my first doubts to surface.
When I set out I was innocent enough to think that university was all about working hard (I was studying theology), absorbing facts and learning how to think and argue — as well as having fun, of course. I soon discovered my mistake. In fact I lasted only a term before deciding I wanted to leave, and I did so at the end of the first year. The problem was that my university — like, I later discovered, most of the others — was much keener on the appearance of success than on actually educating students. And the easiest way to appear to succeed was to lower standards.
Everyone must have prizes now, not just at school, but at university too. The level expected at my (top ten) university was appallingly low. It may be unsurprising to learn that a degree from Nottingham Trent or Sheffield Hallam isn’t particularly rigorous — but when even supposedly ‘good’ universities are soft, it can only lead to the conclusion that degrees are becoming as ambiguous as A-levels.
I never felt as though I was being challenged — indeed, it struck me last Christmas that the only time I had been to the library in the first term was on the introductory tour. There just wasn’t any need. None of the (very little) work set required any independent research. We were merely spoon-fed the information through lecture handouts, and the only work ever set by tutors was the coursework — four short summaries of passages of philosophy, which counted for 40 per cent of the course.
Having virtually no work to do in the first term was fantastic — it gave me a lot of time for socialising and sleeping. But after a while it became a bit disconcerting. What exactly is the point of going to university if you’re not doing any work? Once the novelty of partying has worn off, you just find yourself with a lot of free time and no real purpose. Others on my course have opted to leave university and start work, change courses or try to transfer to another university. Everyone was pretty badly motivated. Although we didn’t talk about work very often, I found out that several people had failed some of the coursework (getting below 40 per cent) and several didn’t show up to one of the end-of-year exams, even though the exam counted towards the final degree mark. My fellow students included art-school drop-outs, drug addicts and evangelical Christians. One student put his hand up in the middle of a lecture to ask the German-Jewish lecturer why he was teaching Jewish studies when he was a Nazi. It didn’t go down terribly well.
It was shocking that such people could get into one of Britain’s ‘Premier League’ universities — but the university’s response was even more of an eye-opener. Rather than responding positively to the problem — say, by setting extra classes for struggling students — the tutors drastically lowered their expectations. It seemed virtually impossible to fail. In the first year I was set a total of three essays, which were to be handed in at the end of the year. The end-of-year exams were set by ‘prior disclosure’. This meant that the exam papers were given to us two months before the actual exams took place. This might seem prudent if some students are struggling and the required standard in the exams is high, but no — I had tackled some of the questions in my AS-levels, and it all seemed to be geared towards the regurgitation of summary sheets handed out in our lectures. It was a piece of cake.
It was quite demoralising that so little was expected of us. It was possible to organise my timetable so that all my lectures took place on Monday and Tuesday, leaving the rest of the week entirely free. After the exams, when people were choosing their modules for next year, one of my friends had selected a timetable that was assessed entirely by coursework. It seemed to be perfectly possible to write eight essays in a year and walk away with a first without sitting a single exam.
Perhaps I should have been grateful. Indeed, students nowadays are not merely students; they are consumers. Increasingly the attitude is, ‘I’ve paid my money, now give me a good degree.’ Richard Sharpley, a professor at Lincoln university, admits that in his opinion many students go to university ‘for a degree, rather than to learn about their subject’. With the estimated cost of university topping £33,500 for a three-year course, students want value for money — an upper second or a first, regardless of how hard they work. Indeed, the number of complaints from students is increasing. From 2003–04 alone the complaints, usually relating to exam results or procedures, rose from 6,796 to 8,682 nationwide. The figures for 2005–06 are likely to represent a substantial increase. In fact, not long ago the Higher Education Funding Council for England released survey results indicating that about 40 per cent of all university undergraduates are dissatisfied with elements of their courses. The way courses are assessed was a particular concern for these students. On thestudentroom.com — an internet chat-room for students — a thread where students are expressing their disappointment with their universities to the extent of dropping out has recorded more than 600 posts since 2005.
So if students are unhappy, what are universities doing to try to appease them? Well, at Glamorgan and Napier universities they’ve taken to electronically tagging their students to make sure they attend lectures and don’t fall behind. But usually the universities try to appease students by making it easier to do well. A friend of my parents used to lecture in the modern languages department at the LSE. He said he was amazed at the extent to which he was expected to ‘mark positively’ — in other words, inflate grades to keep students happy.
When I questioned my lecturers about why certain measures were being taken — the lack of any substantial work and the basic standard required — my personal tutor told me, ‘The course requirement for matriculation is three Bs at A-level. The course is pitched to that standard. It is unfortunate if you feel underworked.’ The university appeals to the lowest common denominator — if you seek anything in the way of an enlightening experience at university, they simply can’t help you.
Again, when I asked why exams were done by prior disclosure another professor told me that it was ‘to make sure that students know what they are supposed to have learnt in their first year’. As the exams covered a total of only eight topics, briefly, the answer is apparently not a great deal. But, hey! If you come out with an impressive-looking degree, who cares how much you’ve actually learnt?
My university was unusual in that my course’s first-year marks counted towards the final degree. I asked why, rather than putting real pressure on students by making the first-year exams matter, an Oxford-style system wasn’t adopted. This would mean that students had to pass the first-year exams to continue, but that they were otherwise meaningless. I was told that ‘university policy states that students cannot be expelled unless they actually fail something. And the university doesn’t want people to leave.’
This response is now typical of non-Oxbridge universities. Stop students failing, keep the government funding coming in. Professor Mike Reddy of the University of Wales recently attracted much media attention for allowing his students not only to set their own questions in their exams, but also to take textbooks in with them ‘in case they couldn’t answer thei r own questions’. Draw your own conclusions.