… but it could be much, much worse.
Politics at Manchester was ranked 2,064th in [a survey in which British students were asked to rank best and worst courses at various universities] but, despite this, there are plans to reduce teaching time.
Manchester University admitted there had been problems and said it was reviewing all its teaching.
“We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable,” a spokesman said.
May 18th, 2009 at 6:36AM
The full article included the most heartening thing I’ve read in some time. At Bristol, economics students protested "exams being reduced from three hours to two."
This is only speculation, but I wonder whether the stove-piping of the British university system, where students focus their courses much more exclusively on their major, makes crappy teaching easier to get away with.
Here, by contrast, my students majoring in education complain incessantly about their bad education, in part because they get exposed to good education when they have to take their outside classes.
May 19th, 2009 at 1:46AM
Manchester isn’t a particularly dodgy university and a quick scan of the website (http://www.manchester.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/search/atoz/course/?code=05140) shows that this is a selective course with around a 4% acceptance rate. The prospectus suggests that 50 students are taken on a year and 46.4 FTE staff were submitted to the RAE; not a bad ratio! How the hell are some of these students not seeing an academic for two years?
In the student survey someone has to come 2064th. But there is a difference between being 2064th with a decent education and 2064th but a bit shit. What’s this? The student survey suggests that 74% of students on this course were satisfied with it (www.unistats.com), putting it at around 160th for politics on the survey; many universities without Manchester’s reputation appear higher on the list. This is ranking by student satisfaction, by entry grades it is 31st.
Worryingly, when sorted by entry tarif, Manchester’s political peers score 90%+ on satisfaction. Except for Bristol, which has the same entry points but 10% lower student satisfaction. Odd that it was ignored by the Telegraph; perhaps they are pulling their fingers out and teaching.
Lots of chunky data make it hard to get away with being crappy.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:22AM
Thank you for that detail, Jim.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:23PM
[…] ********************** Update: Then there’s the politics department. […]