From The Sunday Times
May 17, 2009
Angry students expose worst-taught degrees
Jack Grimston
Course by course ratings from the government-funded National Student Survey 2008
Cuts in teaching hours and growing class sizes have created a new mood of militancy with protests spreading to campuses including Manchester and Sussex.
Last weekend, The Sunday Times reported the first big “tuition fee rebellion” by hundreds of students at Bristol.
Among the courses in the bottom 10% of the government’s National Student Survey are engineering at Manchester and Glasgow, “other languages” at Sussex and psychology at Surrey. They are outranked by the vast majority of courses offered by post-1992 universities in the government research.
The figures show that 33 courses at the elite universities of the Russell Group and the 1994 Group are all ranked below 2,000 in the survey, which questioned more than 200,000 students on 2,175 courses.
Seven of the lowly ranked courses are taught at Bristol, five at Manchester and three at Edinburgh. The bottom courses in the country, however, are three social work degrees — at Swansea, Brunel and Royal Holloway, London, all of which receive satisfaction ratings of less than 50%.
Students complain that teaching time is being cut, classes are becoming bigger and postgraduate students are being used as a cheap alternative to lecturers to teach seminars — despite universities taking increasing amounts of money from undergraduates through fees.
Anna Fazackerley, head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange, said universities were guilty of concealing from students before they applied just how little teaching some of them would receive.
“The government should collect data about how many hours of teaching students receive, whether postgraduate students or professors are doing that teaching and how many students are being packed into classes,” Fazackerley said. “This information is kept incredibly quiet, but parents and students have a right to know what they are paying for.”
Last weekend, it emerged that hundreds of finance and economics students at Bristol had lodged a detailed complaint with grievances ranging from marking being done by fellow students to rising class sizes and cuts in exams from three hours to two.
The latest large-scale protests have broken out at Manchester, forcing the law school to drop a plan to reduce teaching time by one-third.
When undergraduates heard of the plan, they walked out of a lecture theatre and started to protest outside the offices of Alan Gilbert, the vice-chancellor, who has since ordered officials to reconsider.
Students have set up a Facebook group called Reclaim the Uni, which so far has more than 700 members. It asks: “Do you think the university treats you as a number on a computer and milks you like a glorified cash cow? Dissatisfied by the horrendous value for money? Not enough contact hours?”
Despite the victory in the law school, students are still worried that other courses could see cuts in teaching hours — for some modules in politics and economics, seminar time is due to be reduced from five hours to three. Politics at Manchester is already ranked 2,064th in the country.
Sarah Wakefield, 21, a former pupil of Durham Johnston comprehensive, who is studying politics, philosophy and economics at Manchester, said: “It is getting to the stage where people are saying, ‘We might as well do an Open University degree.’
“We are only just getting clues about some of the cuts. . . Students see an increase in fees, but the quality of what we are getting is falling. It is something a lot of people are identifying with now.”
Manchester is carrying out a review of all its teaching. A spokesman said any cuts in classes would be made up by increases in tutorials or other forms of teaching.
He admitted, however, that the university had had problems with teaching. “We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable,” he said.
“The vice-chancellor takes it more seriously than any other part of his agenda.”
At Sussex, the university is pushing ahead with plans to shut its linguistics department and students are preparing to protest against possible cuts to teaching in other courses.
Laura Tazzioli, the president of the students’ union at Sussex, said: “We have been told there will be cuts in associate tutors who do most of the seminar teaching. That covers most of the social sciences and humanities.”
A spokesman for Sussex University said students would see no reduction in the number of hours’ teaching they received.
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