Students and Universities - Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320 - 339)

MONDAY 30 MARCH 2009

MR GREGORY ANDREWS, MR DAVID CHILD, MS VICTORIA EDWARDS, MS MEAGAN PITT, MR JUN RENTSCHLER AND MS SALLY TYE

  Q320  Mr Boswell: And it is well-prepared when you do meet them.

  Mr Andrews: Basically I submit my work and they comment on it, but I get a precedent study every week, at least one, so they have done their research on my project. They also communicate between each other so if one person was not there they would know how far I have progressed in between.

  Q321  Ian Stewart: That is in architecture studies; is that the same experience across other studies?

  Ms Tye: In history we get voluntary tutorials and they are working to implement it more within the department. I did not realise for my first year and a half that I could go with my essay question and have a tutorial on it; however, once I did my grades improved dramatically. I actually pushed this in a meeting and they are actually working now to implement it. Basically you have the option of a tutorial for every single piece of work you do, and that is one-on-one for as long as you need the help. Also you can email them and they email you back and things like that, so they are very accessible.

  Ms Pitt: In terms of law you are welcome to go and see any tutor, in particular if you email them during office hours, and that is something I found very helpful in terms of one-to-one. However, in terms of seminars, because there tend to be quite a few of us in a seminar—

  Q322  Chairman: Give us a number, ten, 15?

  Ms Pitt: I would say between 15 and 20, not that everyone always comes, but it is around that number. It would be more beneficial if it was more than an hour because I often find myself not being able to ask all the questions that I want, and even though I could go to them at a private time I would just forget the question. It would be more beneficial if they extended that hour seminar.

  Q323  Ian Stewart: Is that because you are stimulated by the larger group?

  Ms Pitt: Yes, it does encourage discussion which does bring up more questions so I think we need more time.

  Q324  Ian Stewart: Are you taught by research students, higher degree students or part-time tutors?

  Ms Pitt: All of them are lecturers in the seminars and they are very good at their jobs I have to say, especially considering that coming from school to university it is a big step between independent study and being spoon-fed. That was the most difficult thing for me, I think, so it is important to have a teacher that has the right balance between knowing what they are saying and being able to say it in a way that I understand. In terms of that balance they are quite good.

  Mr Child: I would just like to comment that the staff in the school of technology are very approachable; if you need to speak to a lecturer you can just go to their office and speak to them, they are more than happy to let you stop them during a lecture and ask questions and have a discussion. The thing that probably stands out for me the most is that my twin brother did an undergraduate degree at Bath doing electronic engineering and he was very much surprised that when I refer to a lecturer I refer to them by their first name. This is something that was quite alien to him, you do not do that; the classes were a lot bigger for him and you just did not have that one-to-one contact and that personal relationship with the lecturers, which I guess I have taken for granted because I assumed that was the norm, but clearly that is not the same everywhere.

  Q325  Chairman: Victoria, what is your experience?

  Ms Edwards: We are a small cohort; we were 14, we are now 13. We have five tutors and because midwifery is such a practical subject half our course is spent in practice hours either at the John Radcliffe, the Horton or in the community. They are all tutors who have a long background in midwifery, they are all practising midwives themselves and also they have the whole academic side of it to bring to us as well. Out of our cohort of 13, ten of us are mature students so the midwifery tutors are particularly tuned in to our needs as mature students—the majority of us have children and families. It is not that that means we are asking for special treatment constantly, but we bring something different to the course and our needs are slightly different as well. We have a personal tutor who is responsible for all of us through the whole three years, so we can approach her at any time, and because we are a small group with a small group of tutors we know the tutors very, very well and we can contact them via email, we have their mobiles and we see them and only them in our lectures so it is good.

  Q326  Chairman: Can I just follow up on that really across the piece, but you do not all have to answer this. When Glen and I visited a university in London a number of the students expressed concerns to us about the feedback they got in terms of their academic work, and this was an issue I raised this morning with some students from Oxford University and from the colleges. How do you get feedback to know on your examined work whether you are making process rather than just getting a mark or a few ticks, which is what I used to do? What do you get in terms of feedback that actually improves your performance? Jun?

  Mr Rentschler: I have to say that I am quite dissatisfied with the feedback. I do not know how it works in the other schools but in the business school in the first year I submitted some work and I got I do not know how many per cent but it was quite good, say it was 72 per cent. The lecturer told me it is a good piece of work so I said "There is one-third missing, where is it?" and she said "You cannot score better than 80 in the first place" and I said "All right, what is missing then?" She said it was just the general impression or something like that and so I could not improve anything; I did not know what I did wrong, I did not know how to improve my work, and that has been similar throughout the last two years. Compared to my school education at home in Germany I think it is quite surprising that you have hardly any real possibility to see your exam work, for example. If you do not know and you cannot do your exams afterwards where is the point in doing exams if you do not know what the mistakes are and what to learn from them?

  Q327  Chairman: Any other comments on that?

  Ms Tye: I have had a very different experience. On every single piece of work—we usually get a piece of work midway through the semester and then at the end of the semester and we get the cover sheet marked with all the different requirements and what mark we have got with comments at the bottom. Usually on an essay we have to go for a tutorial to pick up our work and they go through it with us as to what we need to do. If we have done a presentation then usually at the end of the presentation we get feedback on exactly what we have done wrong and why we have got the mark we have got. With exams and things that are right at the end of the semester we usually get an email saying if you want to come back in and pick up your work and discuss your grades you are welcome to in the following semester, so that is even when they are not teaching us.

  Ms Edwards: I have had a mixed experience. The two exams that I have sat have not been midwifery-based—one was a physiology exam and the other was a research exam and they were generic across all the healthcare professions. Those two I have had no feedback from, just a mark, but all the essay assignments that we have handed in for midwifery they tick on the criteria sheet where you came on that but then there is an A4 page on the front and through your work you will find numbers, one to whatever, then you look at the A4 sheet and it is number 1 "You could have expanded this point a bit more", "How about discussing this ... " or number 2: "Don't use colloquialisms" or whatever it is. You can go through the essay and they will give you lots of feedback.

  Mr Child: I would say it is varied, it depends which lecturer it is to be honest. Some are absolutely brilliant, you get reams and reams of paper back telling you everything you could have done better and even highlighting the points that you actually got right and making a deal of the fact that you did it this way and that is a very good way of doing it. That is a positive, but with other lecturers you just get a mark back but in all fairness for the lecturers who just give you a mark you can go and speak to them, you can arrange to go and see them and discuss the work, so there is always the option for feedback if you feel you need it.

  Q328  Chairman: Do most students take advantage of that or if the mark is good enough they do not?

  Mr Child: It depends what your mark is to be honest. If it is a good mark people are quite content with that, if it is a low mark they will be more insistent on finding out what went wrong.

  Ian Stewart: Unless you are Jun and you want the other eight marks.

  Q329  Mr Boswell: Can I just ask a separate question about your interaction with other students on a course. You were talking about relatively small seminar groups which all of you have experienced at some stage, although you, Gregory, said you had one-to-one tuition on an intensive basis for a quarter of an hour at a time. People often say the tutorial as practice down the road is the apogee of learning and the supreme test. How much value do you attach to having your peers in the room, people doing the same course as you and being able to bounce ideas off them as well? We might start with Victoria because she is on a specifically vocational course.

  Ms Edwards: It is hugely important because a lot of what we come across in practice is very emotive and can be quite distressing or can be really thrilling, and when your emotions are going up and down like that and you are dealing with those situations that we are it is really, really important in a safe and confidential environment to be able to discuss those things.

  Q330  Mr Boswell: Would anyone else like to comment?

  Ms Pitt: In terms of law the fact is that there is debate and disagreement in itself, so it is important to get the other person's opinion because what they think I might never have thought of but it is a valid point. That is quite important so I would agree with that.

  Mr Child: Two things on this one. Tutorials being optional, the number of people turning up varies depending on which subject it is. They are useful for improving your understanding and helping with the specific coursework, but one point I would like to make is that the former student project that runs is a non-marks based project so you do not actually get any academic grades out of that, it is purely you wanting to be involved to learn and to work with your peers, which is something the school pushes very hard and is certainly an invaluable experience.

  Q331  Mr Boswell: Just for the record the Chairman and I would say it was a remarkable outcome and—I know you could not be there, David—that presentation at the Commons was really worthwhile, it was brilliant. I would acknowledge everything you say, that you do not have to get marks to do good work, perhaps we should say that. Can I just probe briefly the link between research and teaching? I do not know for a start whether any of you know how research-intensive your tutors are, whether you looked them up on the internet before you decided to honour the university with your presence or whether you have views as to whether their being research-strong is good for you as a pupil or not; any views on that?

  Ms Tye: I am a big fan of research and the history department has a particular strength in research, which you do see in your lectures a lot; you are consistently getting figures or analysis or theses coming—we have not quite published this yet but we just thought we would throw it at you, see what you think. History is a research-based subject so if you did not have people right at the forefront it would be a serious detriment to the level of learning you are getting.

  Q332  Chairman: Can I just check on that? If I am researching Henry VIII and the Tudors—I am not, but let us say I was—and I am a real expert, I know everything about the Tudors and Henry VII's ships et all, but you are being set work on 19th century social and economic history, how does that help, having a researcher working in a totally different area?

  Ms Tye: You would not, you are taught by people who are researching in that area.

  Q333  Chairman: You are stuck with whatever they are interested in.

  Ms Tye: No, because they are very good, they tend to encourage you to actually challenge their ideas. I am doing a module at the moment with a guy called Roger Griffin who does fascism and he has got a very definite idea of fascism, but he is still outlining what everybody else thinks and he is there, "Does anyone want to challenge me, does anyone want to give anything different to this?" and a lot of time they are asking you does anybody want to do an independent module, does anybody want to do research and work with them, challenge their ideas. I wrote an ISM for someone and totally challenged what they believed in and they were totally okay with that.

  Q334  Mr Boswell: Is that pretty well true across the various schools in your experience?

  Ms Pitt: It depends for me personally on the area of law that we are talking about because for theoretical subjects like legal method and constitutional law I prefer someone that is more research-based and knows what they are talking about. In terms of areas like contract, tort, commercial I would prefer someone who has actually practised in the field so they know the nitty-gritty of it and not just the whole theoretical side, so it depends.

  Q335  Dr Harris: You really want the person who is writing the exam paper, do you not?

  Ms Pitt: Yes, probably.

  Q336  Dr Harris: To what extent do you think you are going to get that? Obviously you have not taken your exams yet but to what extent do people know which of the lecturers to have particular regard to, depending on whether they are on the exam board this time, or whatever the equivalent is?

  Ms Pitt: I tend to look at past exam papers. I am only an undergraduate so you can see who did the previous year's and if they are still there that tends to be the person who is doing the exam, so from that I kind of listen to what they say.

  Q337  Mr Boswell: There is some game theory in this. Can I just ask you—my final question—about we hear from perhaps other institutions that sometimes people complain and they say we have got a really good tutor in this department, the only trouble is it is a five-rated department and we never see them and the whole thing is in the hands of graduate students or whatever who teach us. Do you ever get that sort of a problem, of tutors never around to teach you? On the whole I must say you have described situations where your tutors are accessible; is this because they are not very research-intensive or are they super-people?

  Mr Child: Certainly the point on research, from your previous question and this one, there is a mix. Some lecturers are research-intensive, some have apparently no interest, but that is only from what we see. However, I suspect it is rather different in engineering to what it is in other subjects in the fact that although people doing research are pushing the knowledge and understanding we also have a fair few lecturers who have had many years of industrial experience and certainly within the automotive and motor sport sectors any developments in technology and general engineering practices are not necessarily published and do not necessarily have research as such to go with them in the traditional sense, so you do learn from lecturers who are doing current research and are aware of current research, but equally and just as important, if not more important, you are learning from the people who have been there, done that and understood the fundamental engineering principles of the situation they are applying, which has not necessarily been made aware to the general community.

  Q338  Mr Boswell: It seems to me that there is a germ of an agreement with Meagan on that in that you are saying there are some people who will be great on materials science or aerodynamics in principle and somebody else who will fix you up a new diffuser overnight if that is what the Braun team needs.

  Mr Child: Yes, exactly, there is the academic side to the research and the lecturers who are recognised as good researchers and for the work they are doing, but equally there are other people who are not interested at all in publishing research or having any recognition for it; they are more interested in the final result and how to do things, so to be able to learn from both types of people is invaluable.

  Q339  Dr Harris: Meagan, what is your feeling about law students at the other university in Oxford? I ask the open question first and then I have got a few follow-ups.

  Ms Pitt: In what context?


 
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