Live data from Hacker News

For the first time in history, St Andrews outranks Oxbridge

thetimes.co.uk

71–73 of 73 posts

Re: For the first time in history, St Andrews outranks Oxbridge

#71
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former lecturer, I found that student satisfaction often came down to things like how "easy" the lectures are. Big name universities like Oxford traditionally haven't (until recently?) felt the pressure to hit these objectives since they can ride on their reputation.

I friend of mine was a lecturer, and she set exams and tasks which explicitly tested the students' understanding of the material she was teaching, as you would expect - scores for her tests followed a bimodal distribution - indicating that they were working. She got terrible satisfaction scores, and got pressure from 'higher-ups' to reweight the exams so the people in the "fail" group passed.

I'm not sure how to read this. I could interpret the bimodal outcome as the initial skill of the student being the main factor. Either you get it, or you don't, and the lecturer had no real influence on the outcome.

The reweighting is not a good solution, but I would ask questions to the lecturer why a good chunk of her students are failing. It's her responsibility to teach them after all, and not to filter out the elite.

Re: For the first time in history, St Andrews outranks Oxbridge

#73
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former lecturer, I found that student satisfaction often came down to things like how "easy" the lectures are. Big name universities like Oxford traditionally haven't (until recently?) felt the pressure to hit these objectives since they can ride on their reputation.

What do you mean by easy in this context?

Good question, it is slightly nebulous but to do with how much the course requires students to deeply understand the underlying concepts, and how much independent effort it asks of them. For example...

Easy: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students do a very similar example (e.g. both matrices have lots of zeroes in the same cells).

Harder: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students do a matrix that is structurally very different.

Hard: Lecture contains an algorithm for diagonalising 3×3 matrices and an example. Tutorial/exam has students extend the ideas of the algorithm to a specific 4x4 matrix.

My own undergraduate experience was largely in the "hard" category, whilst as a lecturer at a different university there was pressure to move increasingly towards the "easy". It was even fairly explicit: student feedback surveys would be aggregated and you'd be informed that the students are unhappy because the tutorial exercises cover things they "haven't seen" in lectures.

Post reply on HN