h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Or it's a problem with recruitment. Say, on the job description the department say that having degree-level skills are needed, which HR take to mean that only those with a piece of paper to prove it can apply for the job. HR do the sifting to the final shortlist of candidates, so the person writing the job description never even knew that there were people of equal calibre who applied.

On the other hand, I've also heard of companies who are so inundated with applications that they threw every other one away without even reading it. If you have hundreds of applications, you will take any criteria to try and sort them out somehow. Degrees tend to be an easy criteria to pick.

Then again, I met someone the other day who reckoned he was having problems *because* he was degree educated. He claimed that, because they would have to pay him at a higher level, they were overlooking his application in favour of less experienced and qualified candidates who they could pay the lowest possible wage.

Have you spoken to Mrs Zen about job hunting? That lady has told me some of the best job searching advice that I've ever been able to glean from books.

Sorry, I've gone slightly off topic there.

"There should be at least 8 hours of lectures a week, and it should have a value."

Why on earth would we want to be so prescriptive? Surely teaching methods should be in the hands of subject experts, rather than prescribed centrally. Not least because lectures aren't a particularly effective form of teaching for many subjects - there's an old joke about a lecture being a way for information to be moved from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the brains of either. Probably unfair, but with an elephant of truth.

Tutorials (small group discussions led by a tutor), lab sessions, independent research, contribution to online discussion forums, set reading etc etc etc. There's vast number of much more productive ways of teaching than lectures. I'm particularly interested in what's known as "problem based learning" in the medical sciences - as I understand it, it involves presenting a case or a problem, and then getting the students to go and research and solve it. I've never been on the receiving end of this, but I can see it being effective in other subjects too. In my short experience of university teaching, I have to say that tutorials were far more effective than lectures ever were.

Having said that, I do share worries about declining standards and the value of some degrees. When I was marking undergraduate work, some of it was excellent, some of it was of a good standard but with some (often interesting) misunderstandings or misreadings, and some of it was utterly dreadful. And I found I couldn't fail as many utterly dreadful ones as I wanted to. Apparently this experience is very common for research students and junior academics marking undergraduate work - their expectations and standards are much higher, and just how poor some 2:2 or third class work is can come as a shock. A friend talks about his regular "Daily Mail" moments after marking. Now, my experience is from almost ten years ago, so perhaps things have changed, and perhaps it's different elsewhere. However....

Some work that I saw was so poor that I had to question whether they had benefited from the course at all. Some would have been poor if it were the rantings of the pub bore who had never read anything on the subject. As I put it at the time, either
(a) there are some extenuating circumstances that we're not aware of; (b) this is genuinely the best the student can do;
or (c) this is the best the student can be bothered to do.
I was reminded of the classic essay feedback comments like "delusions of adequacy", and "a perfectly good village is missing a perfectly good idiot".

I've defended both social science and humanities students and subjects before, and will continue to do so. But my experience (albeit ten years old now) is that there's huge variation in the effort that students put in. I'd say that as a student I worked as hard as natural sciences/engineering student (albeit not in formal contact hours), but there's no denying that someone smart and organised could breeze through doing the minimum and still emerge with a 2:1 or 2:2 degree. That's probably true of other subjects too, but it's especially true of the social sciences and humanities.

I think part of the problem was expectation setting. I remember as a first year undergraduate having a tutor read the riot act about lack of tutorial preparation when too many people turned up with nothing to say or to contribute. He made it perfectly clear how many hours of preparation was needed per tutorial. Years later, when I was leading tutorials, I was unsure as to whether the best strategy was to proceed on the expectation that the reading had been done and not worry about leaving people behind, or just to be grateful if people turned up, had been to the lecture, and had even the slightest acquaintance with the primary reading. I know what I wanted to do, but I also know what I ended up doing. One of the things that I ended up doing was being told that attendance and preparation was low one week because there was an essay deadline for "another module" that week.

Hopefully things have changed or that my experience is unusual - my experience is only my experience at one institution, and quite a while ago. But I'm not confident.

The nice thing would be, or could be, that we could have equal access to university education; Which as a phrase often gets confused with meaning 'everyone can go to university', which of course it doesn't; just that everyone can have an equal oppertunity to be able to go to university... Of course its something unlikely to happen, as it'd entail improving education earlier on 'in the chain', across the board, from the run-down schools upwards...
It'd also be nice to think there might be a chance at retaining a rigerous accademic line of education, ending in university degrees, whilst developing (or strengthening I guess) alongside that* route, a route for those who the accademic university direction migh tnot be right; both skilled trades type education (perhaps this is getting better with aprenterships now but somehow I doubt it as there seems often too few 'older' skilled tradesmen to train/educate up the youngsters), plus what I guess would have been the more vocational/technical type stuff offered by FE and the old polys... (must admit I'm not at all sure what exists anymore; BTec? GNVQ? HND? OND?... I guess some of them still exist)

The online learning thing is being used more and more already, just between my starting and finishing university the change was huge; then a few years later when my Brother started Uni, they had it even moreso; all their lecturers put matterials up on the intranet, no more pointless wondering about trying to find your lecturer for hours just to get a handout or assignment sheet off em etc...
Plus since then, personally I saw some of a new european wide project for online inclusive educational platforms (I was working on it for a while), Which was a European union funded thing, the plan for which was to put it across all European universitys and I think also other educational institutions; each could adapt it for their needs...

A levels, and before are really the lecture heavy element of education, University is about developing learning abilities, 'learning how to learn', rather than 'being a sponge soaking up information froma lecturer'...

Interestingly, I found, at least, my undergraduate, BSc taught me more, in terms of actual 'knowledge' and also in terms of learning skills and such like, than my Masters, by then the MSc was just about concentrating on a specific area to a level of detail of no use whatsoever unless you followed a particualr path which utalised that information... Though to an extent it did really soely work on the basis of self-directed learning and work, so I guess to some extent carried on from that in the first degree..

You've rung a bell, 2legs:

'learning how to learn'. I say aye to that - along with learning how to think (which would come first, methinks), knowing how (&where) to find what you want and knowing what questions to ask.

Mind you, that's not (or shouldn't be) exclusively the province of unis.

I always figured that self-directed learning was a skill that you had to already have before you went. If you can't already do that to an extent, you won't be able to succeed at university.

Well, it is all part of a pgrogression; The self-directed learning aspect was to an extent (for me at least), pretty well formed by the time I'd finished A-levels... Of course, back then it were all using books and such like as the internet hadn't really* got going quite at that point, but was easy enough transferring that over to using the net to access journals and information by the time I'd started university... I did have some brief exposure to the teaching used in AS levels (which replaced A levels at some point), and it did seem that some of the more academic aspects of A levels, particularly the self directed learning and independant and in-depth aspects of A levels had been lost somewhat, I'd not have been as prepared as I was from A levels to University, if I'd done AS levels to university... As it was my first year at university was something of a breeze, but then I'd managed to do quite well at A levels and seemed a lot further ahead than most of the other people on my degree course...
Actually, thinking about it, the 'learning to think', or 'how to think' bit of A levels was very well taught when I did them; I remember when it came to the mock exams for my Human Biology A level, I was accidentially given the wrong paper; I got the A level biology paper instead of human biology, and, well there were a fair few questions about stuff I just didn't recognize (all about plants and seeds I seem to recall, and somethign about germination, which we'd not covered in the human biology A level). I got 9% on the mock bi biology paper, despite one of the major questions (I think an essay type answer one), being on seed germination which I knew absolutely nothing about... But I was able to 'think' the answer to the question, just using logic and what I knew of biology from the human biology A level... Hmmm... I'm probably not a good judge though of what constitutes an average student as I then went on to get the highest (percentage) awarded for a degree in my department at university ... sod all good its done me since mind

I do remember thinking at the time, when they were fiddling about with A levels and going over to AS levels that it seemed very odd to be changing the format of a course of study, which was designed for preparing students for university study, or I ugess in reverse, university degrees being courses designed to continue on from peoples studying A levels rather than AS

But, having said which, the leaning to learn, or learning how to think has been the useful bit of my degree/study, its not particularly useful even though I can do it, to from memmory give the Chromosomal location or molecular weight of various genes/molecules, but I gradulaly moved more onto computer related things, and even though its something I was never taught it was easy enough to learn anything I came up against

When I did my biology degree..a good few years ago the bit I loved most was the research project we did in the final year. You had to put all you had learned about research methodology in biology into practice in a proposal of your choice.

I went to the Pyrenees and took all manner of equipment with me to study something when I got there..I didn't know what it might be I went with a friend and we happened to camp by this mountain stream that had vast numbers of a particular caddis fly larvae in it. I did my project on them, the parts of the stream they lived in, and the different ways they had of feeding..It was ages before I could even find out what species they were. Finally after sending some to a French trichopteran specialist I discovered what they were, and I was very chuffed that he told me one of their methods of feeding I'd discovered, was new to science and I gave some samples to the Natural History museum as they had no samples of that species, (they'll be in their vaults still I hope).

Anyway I think universities should concentrate much more on that kind of thing. Encourage people to do research with the knowledge learned earlier on in the course.

It's absolutely fantastic to do for anyone.