I disagree with Dave’s argument on almost every particular and with the
kind of thinking that inspires the individual comments.
The student body at this University is diverse and on this campus
predominantly made up of mature students: they arrive from a variety of
backgrounds and have vastly different experiences of education prior to
their arrival. The idea that they start on a level playing field is
ludicrous (leaving aside any question of disability or learning
difficulty); I hardly ever see a student who is 18 and just completed
three A levels. The notion of first year study skills programmes was
to inform A level students of the different requirements in
presentation for higher education work. If students are starting
virtually from scratch in the field of written presentations, I fail to
see how 10 or 12 hours of someone talking to them about generalities is
going to make a significant difference, particularly when eleven years
or so of compulsory education has not got the job done.
There is no mystery about this; if individual students do not know how
to write to an acceptable standard, then someone is going to have to
explain it to them and explain it in detail. Some people have
conscientious personal tutors, others have supportive partners or
parents; others are thrown entirely on their own resources. It is no
use returning work to such students with comments like ‘non-sentence’
or ‘poor punctuation’ in the margin to people who lack the fundamental
knowledge to be self-critical. I would be delighted if lecturers felt
obliged to go over work with students on an individual basis and
explain precisely what is unsatisfactory; for a number of reasons, this
does not happen in practice.
Quite frankly, if academic staff are unhappy about the level of support
some students need, they should raise entrance standards to ensure that
students have the basic skill base they deem satisfactory. They will
then be free to treat degree level study as a form of extended 11 plus
in which the unfit are weeded out rather than a system of teaching
practice that establishes that successful individual students have
achieved a basic level of competence by the conclusion of their
courses. Of course, this will knock down the number of those taking
higher education to around 5% of the population as a whole, but hey,
let’s return to the mythical standards of the golden era of exclusivity.
Regards, Bernard
ome page: http://www.wmin.ac.uk/ccpd/
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Bernard Doherty
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