Tutorial sheets? I prefer Youtube! Credit: http://www.theunemployee.com
— United Kingdom
– Magus Magister, Education Correspondent
Government sources and several special interest groups have finally published independent reports on student satisfaction with education which have each independently come to the conclusion that 80% of students at university are unhappy with the amount of work they are given. Several student unions have consulted with their students and have published official responses to their universities, suggesting ways in which students can be taught without having to attend their lectures or even be awake during college teaching hours. One student union, Imperial College Union, recommended that lecturers hold “open book” end-of-year tests or for harder exams provide an answer sheet for students to take into the exam. They said that the ethos behind such policies is that students shouldn’t have to worry about academic study while undertaking a university degree.
Imperial College Union President Scott Brown had this to say:
“When I came to university, I didn’t come to spend several hours a week in the library. Rather, I came with the expectation that I would have 3 or four years of self-discovery and experimentation while being fed the answers I needed to pass the degree, just like at school. I’m sure that many students are similarly surprised to learn that when the reach university they are expected to spend many precious hours during the prime of their life looking in books and listening to lectures. During my school career, while there was an adult who stood at the room during classes, their main purpose was to keep the general noise level in the room to a level suitable for whispered conversations about television shows from the night before. Instead, at university these people, so called ‘lecturers’ actually draw attention to your conversations and expect you to give them your undivided attention as they ramble on about some old fact that an old man discovered a long time ago. It’s just not relevant for today’s society or today’s generation. This needs to change!”
However, there has been some controversy as several upstanding academics have questioned the integrity of the reports. Professor First Name Last Name, Professor of Statistics at London University X stated, “It has become clear to me after reading through the various reports submitted by different groups that there is only one original piece of work from which the other published reports have been derived. Some of these authors obviously feel that we will not notice the widespread plagiarism if they paraphrase a friend’s work or simply translate it online into a few different languages and then back into English. Other authors have seamlessly integrated entire Wikipedia pages into their reports almost word for word, while others have varied their copying between several reports published last year. Either way the lack of professionalism is disappointing and I do hope the authors apply themselves more next time, I’ve seen their readership scores and they’ve shown far more potential.”
The News That's Not 