Higher education in the UK is in something of an interesting state these days. Driven by a desire to become a commercialised consumer-pleasing entity, the focus on research and education has been lost in favour of a desire to sate businessmen and government ministers, while filling the coffers. This is demonstrated clearly by our current influx of undergraduate students. It is now the University (and thus the department’s) job to attract as many students as possible from a mass of lemmings who follow the path to university simply because it’s the ‘done thing’. Gone is a time when students applied to university because they actually had a desire to learn, as is a time when students were awarded places based on merit not on making up the numbers. These days, our department is fined if they don’t make a certain allocation of students. As a result, we get second-rate students who aren’t really interested to make up the shortfall. There are of course exceptions, but these are getting more rare as years go by.

I’ve been struck by quite a few examples of this student apathy over the last year, and been made clearly aware of the exam treadmill that gets them here in the first place. At our student-staff liason meetings, it has become clear that students now feel it is the university’s job to spoon-feed them every piece of information, in just the same way this presumably happen in college beforehand. It seems they just can’t be bothered to try out examples for themselves, especially not outside of lectures or tutorials, and actually copying down notes is just too much effort. No, ‘give us printed notes’ they say; even when the notes are available online, that can be too much. ‘You should teach x, y and z as well’; because they can’t be expected to learn for themselves.

Very little is learnt by staring zombie-fashion at notes. Just copying down notes is pretty much equivalent to reading through them about ten times; the information is ingested in the process of writing them on paper. The only way to truly learn is to try; doing lots of examples will teach a concept much faster than a dry lecture. The only way to enjoy learning is to initiate the process yourself; do it because you want to, not because you have to. The latter is the most essential point that has been lost. Because students are largely no longer enthused by what they are learning, they don’t apply themselves in anything like the same manner. Such lifeless learning was once solely the domain of the school classroom, but a system where over 90% go on to university means that the same thing now filters into our colleges and universities.

Equally, it seems we are not even allow to tell them when their work is not up to scratch. It can’t be really average or poor; it can only be average or poor when applied relatively to the rest of the class. Nonsense is now good, if it’s better than the utter nonsense which is merely average. What if we hand out low marks? Clearly we’re not marking things ‘properly’; we’re not following the ‘marking scheme’.

At least one good thing comes from this; those of us who are are actually intelligent, those are of us who actually enjoy doing what we do, are even more unique than before and should hopefully stand out from the crowd when the time comes to go hunting for jobs.