Quality Of Students Is The Real Issue For Universities

19 December 2008

The Bradley review of higher education would no doubt increase the number of graduates, but the quality of those graduates would become even lower than at present and a very large proportion would be unemployable ("Billions for a clever country", December 17). We don't need more graduates, we need better graduates.

Having worked in higher education for more than 30 years, I have seen the level of scholarship drop to alarming levels. My colleagues continually complain that so many students cannot or will not do even basic tasks related to effective study. They do not read books or academic journals; they come to tutorials with nothing to contribute; they cannot express themselves in writing with reason and logic and the writing is neither concise nor grammatically correct; they rely on plagiarism or at best a cut-and-paste job from the internet with no evidence of understanding. There are good, serious students, but academics spend too much of their time assessing work that is tokenistic and should be failed with no questions asked.

So what should be done? First, make entry standards more rigid. Require all students to pay for their first year even if they have to take a loan to do so. Then require attendance on campus for at least five weeks at the end of that first year. During that time, students would take exams and participate in tutorials that would be assessed for input. This period would clearly indicate who should progress and who should fail and repeat at their own expense.

More importantly, results obtained in this way would become the basis for fee reductions or scholarships. Each university would have an equal sum of money for this purpose and so less popular universities would be able to compete.

Regional and city universities should be linked so staff and students can get out of our expensive, dysfunctional cities.

Graham Patterson Armidale


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