Writing About: Top-up Fees are the way forward, especially if you want good education, 17/01/06, Udayan’s outlet of frustration
Recently, I’ve been demonstrating to 1st year undergraduates again – looking after them in the labs, making sure that they don’t blow themselves or me up, and trying to impart some chemical knowledge on them. I’ve just finished one course, and am in the middle of a second, and I have come around to the belief that in the difference between the approaches to teaching demonstrated in these courses lies a much more profound insight into some of the issues that have been discussed on Udayan’s blog.
Both courses are 6 days in the lab, spread over 3 weeks.
First up, Organic Chemistry. Recently “re-invented” to be new and exciting, this course tries to get students to think in a research manner, by telling them hardly anything about the experiment that they will be conducting. Each lab session involves one simple chemical procedure, sometimes linked to the procedure in the following session. Students usually finish in about half the available time.
Next up, Inorganic Chemistry. Practically unchanged in the last 20 years, this course presents students with some demanding practical work, along with new concepts that they have probably only touched on before. Students are told in some detail what they will be doing and how to analyse the results. Students usually require most of the available time.
So which works better? Which do students enjoy more? The new course, trying to get 1st year undergraduates to think like researchers, or the old-school one? Perhaps suprisingly, the feeling is strongly in favour of the old inorganic course, and the reason for this is perhaps unexpected: the organic course is not taxing enough.
The organic course was spoon-feeding students with techniques, without the context for it to make sense. The inorganic course shook them all up – gave them lots to take on board rapidly, pressed their time-management and organizational skills much harder, and actually forced them to think about what they were doing.
And you know what? They like it. It’s exhausting to demonstrate, because there are so many questions. Questions that should have been raised during the organic course, but weren’t because the students weren’t engaged. During the organic course, the students were in an A-Level “give me information” mindset, but now they’re mostly in a university “help me work it out” mindset.
So what’s the generality of this? In the discussion on Udayan’s article, I have been mostly arguing that universities are elite institutions that should teach students to think, and the counter argument is that actually, many people are at university because they want a high-paid job.
In the previous discussion I have been somewhat misrepresented as feeling that everybody should come to university because they love their subject and want to become academics, and that anyone going off to accountancy or investment banking is a waste of space. This is not what I feel at all.
What I feel to be critical is to recognize that what universities should be teaching their students is how to think at a higher level, and get away from the A-Level mindset, viz:
...I’m just saying that regardless of how good you are at managing a company if you read any subject at any decent university and obtain a 2:2 or a 2:1 or a first, you will be taken in at a good position. you may not be as good as the hard working chap who worked his way up, but you stil get a head start in life.
i.e. go to university, get taught a load of stuff, get a degree, get a good job.
I think that this view of a degree leading to a job is fundamentally wrong. For the most part, graduate recruiters don’t care about what you learned in your degree – they care about what you learned about yourself. In a non-technical role, recruiting graduates is a way of sifting for people who have a high intellectual capacity, and no more.
Thinking that coming to a top university and getting a 2.1 or a 1 is going to guarantee a quick route into a 6-figure salary is a disastrous mistake. Take a look at some graduate application forms – they’re almost all competency-based, and degree work isn’t going to be able to fill many competencies. My degree gets 3 lines on my CV, because that’s all it’s worth; “Oh, and I also have a 1st (Hons) from Warwick.”
If you can’t demonstrate the higher-level thought processes that employers really want, then you’ve been wasting your time here. You don’t develop these processes by being spoon-fed information and sitting a few exams, you develop them by analysing and synthesizing the information that you are presented with.
I heard this idea described well recently:
You may think that you’re here to learn chemistry. You’re not. You’re here to understand chemistry – once you understand it, you won’t have to learn any more
There are always new concepts and ideas, but once the capacity for processing information is in place, this new information is easily assimilated, prioritized, analysed and synthesized into something new. That’s the skill that you need to take away from university: not a detailed understanding of quantum phenomena, macroeconomics, Kant, or anything else. It’s not the information that’s important, it’s what you do with it.
