The new term is well under way now, and the campus is alive with chattering students and harrassed looking Academics. We in the Professional Services departments tend to be a bit more relaxed, at this time of year, as we haven’t had a long summer break away from the campus, where the Academics have no doubt been writing up research papers and spending long periods of time staring into the distance thinking about the new term! I don’t envy them as students’ expectations today are very different from the 10 years ago when I was teaching. Having to pay £9,000 for the privilege, and it is a privilege, of ‘reading for a degree’ focusses the mind, and many students feel that if they are paying then they are in some way ‘entitled’ to a degree, in the same way as if they are purchasing a McDonalds it should be edible-how edible they actually are is of course open to interpretation and palate. I agree that students should expect a first class service in terms of the quality of lectures, prompt response to reasonable email requests, good computer services, in all, an excellent learning environment.
My office has paper thin walls and is situated next to the 24 hour computer room, beacuse of this I hear a lot of students commenting on their student expectations-and a lot more besides! Sometimes I go out of my office and discuss issues that they raise with them, and time after time their issue seems to be that they should get a good degree-2.1 or 1st-simply for turning up at lectures and handing in a essay now and again, they have ‘paid’ for it after all. I liken it to buying a gym membership and then only going sparodically-you won’t get very fit! (It is also important to bear in mind that there are different body types, so we can’t all achieve the same level of fitness or flexibility!) Sometimes the students understand this, but quite often they don’t. If I recieved a £ for every time a hear a student say, ‘but it’s not fair, I stayed up all night writing that essay, I should have recieved a higher grade’, I would have been able to retire many years ago. Life isn’t fair, and I do feel some sympathy for the students who work really hard, but academic writing eludes them. I do wonder about the quality of advice they received about going to University, but that’s a blog for another day.
Just listening to the students this week much of the talk has been about the concept of academic writing, and for many students the concept of a paragraph is genuinely baffling. In this day of social media and emojis it’s not surprising that everything is reduced to a sound bite, abbreviation or picture. For all students struggling with how to write a good paragraph you might find the following link useful…
Great advice on writing effective paragraphs.
As to how to make the world more fair, I’m not sure I have a link for that, but I’m working on it….