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Leave the kids alone!

Posted in Education, Literature with tags , , , , on February 6, 2012 by telescoper

I’ve been annoyed ever since I woke up this morning because there was an item on the 7am news that irked me. A person called Claire Tomalin was quoted as saying, among other things, that

Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity.

She goes on to lay most of the blame for this shortcoming on television, as such people tend to do.

It’s a facile argument. For one thing most of Dickens’ novels were originally published in short installments, so reading them  that way seems quite a sensible approach to me, and one that should probably be encouraged not criticized.  There’s no getting away either from the fact that some of Dickens’ output is very heavy going indeed. Dare I say that not all Dickens is particularly good? Not liking Dickens is a matter of taste, not a mental defect caused by watching Big Brother.

And another thing: what fraction of children in Dickens’ time could read at all? Much lower than today, I suspect.

Claire Tomalin’s comment is  not just a lazy generalization, it’s also yet another easy shot at the  younger generations who have to put up with this sort of gibe from middle-aged grouches over and over again.

Examination results usually provoke similar outbursts, related to “dumbing down”. I actually do think that, at least in some subjects, examinations are much easier than they were “in my day”, but I don’t think that’s a reason to criticize the examinees. It’s more a fault with the examiners, who have decided that the young can’t cope with difficult challenges. That’s an insult in its own right. I maintain my view that education, especially higher education, is not about making things easy.  It’s about showing students that they can do things that are hard. Most importantly, though, dumbing down examinations is not the same as dumbing down people.

It’s not just young schoolkids that attract such ill-informed invective. I come across it quite regularly with respect to the (alleged) lack of skills possessed by the young adults (usually 18-22) we teach as undergraduates, some of it even from colleagues.

I was thinking the other day what a boon it is for a middle-aged fogey – and obvious potential grouch – like myself to have the pleasure of actually talking to so many younger people at work, and listening to what they have to say. That way I’ve come to my own conclusions about what they’re really like. You know, like you do with people. Most folk  of my age don’t have jobs that bring them into contact with younger folk, so they have  to rely on articles in the Daily Telegraph to tell them  what to think. That, sadly, even goes for those lecturers who have fixed ideas about the inferiority of “students nowadays”.

I think I’ve been very lucky, especially over the last few years, to have had the opportunity to work with a wide range of students as, e.g., project supervisor or tutor. Interactions like this provide a constant reminder not to generalize about the generations. There is of course a range of ability and commitment, but there was in my day too. The majority  still work hard,  learn quickly, and are friendly and courteous. There’s also no doubt in my mind that the best students nowadays are as good as they have ever been, if not better.

It’s the oldies who are the problem.

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The Unprofessional Professors

Posted in Education with tags , , , on November 26, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve been so preoccupied with other things over the past week or so that I haven’t had time until now to comment on an article I saw in last week’s  Times Higher about the role of a Professor in a modern university; there’s also an accompanying editorial in the same issue although, as is usual for editorials in the Times Higher, it doesn’t actually say anything that adds to the original piece.

People outside academia probably wonder what makes a Professor different from a Lecturer or Reader, apart from being older and getting paid a bit more. Undergraduate students probably wonder even more because they don’t see any obvious evidence that Prof. X is any better at teaching than plain Dr. Y. Quite possibly the reverse, in fact.

If you look at the contract of a Professor you won’t find that helps much either. Mine just says words to the effect that I should do whatever the Head of School asks me to do. In my case I have no complaints. I do teaching (lecturing, project supervision, tutorials, exercise classes), administration (various committees, and Director of Postgraduate Studies) and research (including supervising PhD students and a PDRA, publishing papers, etc) and I also do a few things outside the University such as STFC panels. I’m not complaining at all about this workload, for which  consider myself to be quite well paid. What I find difficult is swapping between so many different tasks even during the course of a single day, and I am all too aware that things  do sometimes fall through the cracks.

The criteria for promotion to the rank of Professor (i.e. to a “Chair”)  operated by most universities generally state that a professor must excel at teaching, administration and research. This provides for even greater mystification when you look around the average department because you’ll find many – probably even a majority – who couldn’t administer the skin on a rice pudding, and who make only derisory attempts to teach. These are the ones who have done it all on research, which in reality easily trumps the other two. To paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: there are teaching, administration and research but the greatest of these is research. In fact the others don’t matter much at all.

The point is, at least in physics, that current levels of funding for undergraduate teaching mean that departments are financially unviable if they rely on undergraduate teaching as their primary source of income. It’s therefore inevitable that the primary criterion for appointing and retaining staff is their ability to win research grants and be a star performer in the REF. Indeed, many promotions to Chair happen when a member of staff threatens to leave, and take  their research grants and publication statistics with them. Furious negotiations then take place, a promotion to Chair ensues, and more likely than not a reduced teaching and administration load for the newly minted Prof.  Of course this means the load for someone  else has to go up. And if they are given management tasks to do, the Prof will manage the workload by simply not doing it, letting everything fall to bits until the job is allocated to someone else. Likewise with teaching: if you do it so badly that the students fail their exams or complain that you’re useless, you’ll just find your courses are given to someone else and you have more time to indulge your research interests. Studied incompetence is the ally of selfishness. It actually pays to be bad.

This is such a successful strategy that many departments now have as many professors as other teaching staff, if not more, a significant fraction of whom shirk their adminstrative duties and make little effort to teach well. Why should they? They know that as long as they hold onto their research grants they are indispensible, no matter how much strain they put on their colleagues. You might argue that this is unprofessional conduct, but there’s no question that it works.

Given this state of affairs, it’s hardly surprising that junior staff complain that their professors don’t show sufficient leadership and don’t take an active role in mentoring younger staff.  Selfishness pays. How many leaders can a department sustain anyway? If 2/3 of the staff are professors can they all be leaders? Who will follow?

I’ll get into trouble if I name individuals in my department – they know who they are – but I’m sure people in other universities recognize the same thing in their own departments. The situation won’t change until a funding regime is put in place that requires departments to prove commitment to excellence in teaching in the same way that they do for research. Then promotions panels might actually start to follow  their own published criteria instead of doing what they do now, which is nothing short of systematic hypocrisy.

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Why go to University?

Posted in Education with tags , , on September 29, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve just got time this morning before the Astronomy Grants Panel reconvenes for another day of deliberations to put up a quick postette. I thought of this quote the other day when we were inducing inducting inductifying enrolling the new undergraduates. I think it encapsulates what I think a university actually is, specifically why it’s essential for a University education to be part of an environment that also encompasses research, and why even in the digital age (and beyond),  personal interaction between student and teacher will always be essential. Call me old-fashioned.

The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already.

From The Idea of a University, by Cardinal John H. Newman, Chapter 2.

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Open Admissions

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , , , on August 21, 2010 by telescoper

As I predicted  last week, the A-level results announced on Thursday showed another increase in pass rates and in the number of top grades awarded, although I had forgotten that this year saw the introduction of the new A* grade. Overall, about 27% of students got an A or an A*, although the number getting an A* varied enormously from one course to another. In Further Maths, for example, 30% of the candidates who took the examination achieved an A* grade.

Although I have grave misgivings about the rigour of the assessment used in A-level science subjects, I do nevertheless heartily congratulate all those who have done well. In no way were my criticisms of the examinations system intended to be criticisms of the students who take them and they thoroughly deserve to celebrate their success.

Another interesting fact worth mentioning is that the number of pupils taking A-level physics rose again this year, by just over 5%, to a total of just over 30,000. After many years of decline in the popularity of physics as an A-level choice, it has now grown steadily over the past three years. Of course not everyone who does physics at A-level goes on to do it at university, but this is nevertheless a good sign for the future health of the subject.

There was a whopping 11.5% growth in the number of students taking Further Mathematics too, and this seems to be part of a general trend for more students to be doing science and technology subjects.

The newspapers have also been full of  tales of a frantic rush during the clearing process and the likelihood that many well-qualified aspiring students might miss out on university places altogether. Part of the reason for this is that the government recently put the brake on the expansion of university places, but it’s not all down to government cuts. It’s also at least partly because of the steady increase in the performance of students at A-level. More students are making their offers than before, so the options available for those who did slightly less well than they had hoped very much more limited.

In fact if you analyse the figures from UCAS you will see that as of Thursday 19th August 2010, 383,230 students had been secured a place at university. That’s actually about 10,000 more than at the corresponding stage last year. There were about 50,000 more students eligible to go into clearing this year (183,000 versus 135,000 in 2009), but at least part of this is due to people trying again who didn’t succeed last year. Clearly they won’t all find a place, so there’ll be a number of very disappointed school-leavers around, but they also can try again next year. So although it’s been a tough week for quite a few prospective students, it’s not really the catastrophe that some of the tabloids have been screaming about.

I’m not directly involved in the undergraduate admissions process for the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University, where I work, but try to keep up with what’s going on. It’s an extremely strange system and I think it’s fair to say that if we could design an admissions process from scratch we wouldn’t end up with the one we have now. Each year our School is given a target number of students to recruit; this year around 85. On the basis of the applications we receive we make a number of offers (e.g.  AAB for three A-levels, including Mathematics and Physics, for the MPhys programme). However, we have to operate a bit like an airline and make more offers than there are places. This is because (a) not all the people we make offers to will take up their offer and (b) not everyone who takes up an offer will make the grades.

In fact students usually apply to 5 universities and are allowed to accept one firm offer (CF) and one insurance choice (CI), in case they missed the grades for their firm choice. If they miss the grades for their CI they go into clearing. This year, as well as a healthy bunch of CFs, we had a huge number of CI acceptances, meaning we were the backup choice for many students whose ideal choice lay elsewhere. We usually don’t end up recruiting all that many students as CIs – most students do make the grades they need for their CF, but if they miss by a whisker the university they put first often takes them anyway. However, this year many of our CIs held CFs with universities we knew were going  to be pretty full, and in England at any rate, institutions are going to be fined if they exceed their quotas. It therefore looked possible that we might go over quota because of an unexpected influx of CIs caused by other universities applying their criteria more rigorously than they had in the past. We are, of course, obliged to honour all offers made as part of this process. Here in Wales we don’t actually get fined for overshooting the quota, but it would have been tough fitting excess numbers into the labs and organizing tutorials for them all.

Fortunately, our admissions team (led by Helen Hunt Carole Tucker) is very experienced at reading the lie of the land. As it turned out, the feared influx of CIs didn’t materialise, and we even had a dip into the clearing system to  recruit one or two good quality applicants who had fallen through the cracks elsewhere.  We seem to have turned out all right again this year, so it’s business as usual in October. In case you’re wondering, Cardiff University is now officially full up for 2010.

There’s a lot of guesswork involved in this system which seems to me to make it unnecessarily fraught for us, and obviously also for the students too! It would make more sense for students to apply after they’ve got their results not before, but this would require wholesale changes to the academic year. It’s been suggested before, but never got anywhere. One thing we do very well in the Higher Education sector is inertia!

I thought I’d end with another “news” item from the Guardian that claims that the Russell Group of universities – to which Cardiff belongs – operates a blacklist of A-level subjects that it considers inappropriate:

The country’s top universities have been called on to come clean about an unofficial list or lists of “banned” A-level subjects that may have prevented tens of thousands of state school pupils getting on to degree courses.

Teachers suspect the Russell Group of universities – which includes Oxford and Cambridge – of rejecting outright pupils who take A-level subjects that appear on the unpublished lists.

The lists are said to contain subjects such as law, art and design, business studies, drama and theatre studies – non-traditional A-level subjects predominantly offered by comprehensives, rather than private schools.

Of course when we’re selecting students for Physics programmes we request Physics and Mathematics A-level rather than Art and Design, simply because the latter do not provide an adequate preparation for what is quite a demanding course.  Other Schools no doubt make offers on a similar basis. It’s got nothing to do with  a bias against state schools, simply an attempt to select students who can cope with the course they have applied to do.

Moreover, speaking as a physicist I’d like to turn this whole thing around. Why is it that so many state schools do teach these subjects instead of  “traditional” subjects, including sciences such as physics?  Why is that so many comprehensive schools are allowed to operate as state-funded schools without offering adequate provision for science education? To my mind that’s a real, and far more insidious, form of blacklisting than what is alleged by the Guardian.

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Another kick in the teeth…

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on December 23, 2009 by telescoper

I shall  attempt to beat the weather tomorrow and fly up to the North-East for Christmas break. This blog will therefore be offline for a few days (if I succeed in getting airborne). I wish I had a bit of good news to post before the holiday, but I’m afraid there’s even more bad news. Yesterday, Lord Mandelson (yes,  another unelected member of the government) has written to the Chairman  of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) outlining their budget for 2010-11.

The letter confirms £180 million in efficiency savings from the 2009 Budget and an £83 million deduction following last year’s grant letter. On top of those there’s another cut of £135 million ““the higher than expected costs of student support during the economic downturn”. Of this cut, £84 million will be switched from capital baselines, leaving a £51 million cut in teaching grant.  The letter says these savings should be delivered “in ways that minimise impact on teaching and students”, but doesn’t say who should bear the maximum impact. It also says “greater efficiency, improved collaboration and bearing down on costs will need to be combined with a commitment to protect quality and access”. In other words, all we have to do is supply a high-quality service at bargain-basement prices. Easy.

The research element of the funding is held roughly constant (at the obvious expense of teaching): “we have agreed to switch £84 million from your capital baselines, so that the reductions to the teaching grant can be held to £51 million.” Although the research funding is maintained in level, Mandelson says “securing greater economic and social impact will be important over the next year”. Not thinking in the short term, then. Next year will do.

The letter also asks HEFCE to develop proposals on:

  • Creating a more diverse higher education landscape, by increasing the range of alternatives to the full-time three year degree;
  • Maximising the impact that higher education makes to the economy by supporting the programmes with highest economic and social value;
  • Supporting research concentration to underpin our world class ranking, while continuing to support excellence in research;
  • Developing a standard set of information about higher education, so that all students can exercise informed choice about courses and institutions.

What these points really mean is:

  • Realising that slashing student support and increasing fees is going to deter many students from doing a degree, Mandy wants us to make up for it by offering more part-time degrees so students can work full-time as well as studying. Bad news for laboratory-based subjects.
  • Impact again. I’ve explained what that means already
  • In the letter, Mandelson makes clear the “Government’s presumption in favour of more, rather than less, research concentration”. Apparently they don’t care about doing the best research possible, just doing it in a smaller number of places. Idiotic. More worryingly still, Mandelson asks HEFCE to suggest how to achieve this in the 2010-11 allocations. In other words he wants HEFCE to tweak the funding  allocations arising from the 2008 RAE even further to stamp out excellence that isn’t sufficiently “concentrated”.
  • One size clearly fits all in Mandy’s Discount House of Higher Education.

Finally, Mandelson leaves us with the following message of goodwill

Over the next year, moving towards a sustainable position on pensions within the sector will be a key challenge

In other words, “I’m after your pensions too….”

Merry Christmas, Lord Mandelson. It’s a good job you’ll be out on your ear after the next election. But then I assume you’ve got a nice fat pension stashed away already.

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