From myself and Des’ posts on the matter and the comments both posts have recieved, it would seem fair to say that people agree that academic standards are on a slide. I’ve been pondering this for a while now and I’ve decided to summarise my views on why standards here in NUI Maynooth have been sliding from direct experience during my 8 years here in this article. These views are based directly on my experiences from a 4 year Double Honours degree in Science (Experimental Physic and Computer Science), 4 years of study for my PhD, 5 years of demonstrating in Computer Science laboratories and 3 years of lecturing to Computer Science students (Information Processing to 2nd Arts & HDipIT students).

In this article I will discuss one by one the factors I believe have been responsible for the falling standards in the Science Faculty at NUI Maynooth.

The abolition of the BSc General

The first time I started thinking about standards and worrying about standards falling was when I heard that the BSc general was to be abolished in the final year of my degree. Up to that point about 80% of students doing science degrees did the three-year General degree and only the top 20% or so went into the 4th year for an honours degree. The entry into honours was governed by your 2nd year marks and you had to get over 55% to be admitted into honours stream. In my year there were 12 honours Experimental Physics students and 20 honours Computer Science students.

There was a very good reason for the minimum requirement for honours, the honours course was tough going! When the general degree was abolished all students were automatically entered into the honours stream without any need to meet a minimum requirement apart from passing second year (i.e. 40%). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that one of two things could happen here, either the failure rate would rocket up or the standards would plummet. As you can guess it was the latter as courses started being scaled down or dropped completely in third and fourth year to ensure that the students who should have been in the now non-existent general stream still passed in the honours stream.

The reduction of first year courses by 25%

The next major change was the reduction by a whopping 25% of lecture hours for all first year science students. In my first year we had 16 lecture hours a week (as well as labs and tutorials of course), four per subject per week. After I graduated that was reduced to just three per subject per week. This meant that a quarter of the modules once thought in first year had to go. Most of these modules were pre-requisites for modules in later years so they could not be dropped but had to be pushed back to second year, in turn pushing second year modules back to third year, third year modules to 4th year and 4th year modules out of existence altogether. By loosing an entire quarter of a year in one fell swoop there was no way standards could not drop.

A pre-occupation with pass rates

This was discussed in detail by Des so I’m not going to dwell on this. Basically pressure was applied on departments by the University administrators to pass more students. This resulted in modules being simplified and more difficult modules disappearing all together. Weak students were being let into second year when they were simply not fit for second year so second year had to be toned down for them and that effect just rippled up the years. I’ll give two examples of this.

Firstly, courses in Perl and Matlab have now completely disappeared from the Computer Science and Software Engineering degree. I used to demonstrate both these modules and was exceptionally disappointed to see them go.

Secondly, I think Data Structures and Algorithms demonstrates really well how courses get diluted. In my second year Data Structures and Algorithms started off with the basics of stacks, queues, linked lists and trees and then went on to go into their applications including implementing a binary search tree, implementing node balancing with both AVL and Red-Black tress and culminating in the implementation of the Huffman Encoding algorithm for data compression in C++. The course also went into searching and sorting algorithms in great detail culminating in an implementation in C++ of the recursive quick-sort algorithm. Now students don’t even learn about Huffman encoding let alone implement it, they also don’t implement AVL trees, red black trees or even simple binary search trees. Basically students learn about these data structures but not their applications and they certainly don’t have to program even the half of what we had to do. This was brought into stark contrast when I was talking to a 4th year who did Data Structure and Algorithms two years ago. He said it was useless theory with no application in the real world. I was shocked so I explained what WE did in DaA in my second year and his jaw dropped. He had only done about half of what I’d done and was exceptionally annoyed to have been deprived of a proper DaA course. Why was he deprived of this course? Because the standards were dropped to up the pass rate.

A change in student attitudes

I have noticed over my time demonstrating in labs and lecturing that there has been a steady change in students attitudes. I call it the rise of the secondary school mentality in university. Students expect to be given everything on a plate, to never have to do any independent work and want to pass with the absolute minimum of effort. There are also more and more students in college against their will. They are not there because they want to be but because their parents made them go, just like you get in secondary schools.

There are many theories on why there is this change in attitude. Darragh suggested it was because everyone can go to college for free so they don’t value it. I think it has a lot to do with parents molly-coddling children further and further into adulthood and basically making their decisions for them. In reality it’s probably a little of both.

The effect of this however is that if students are not spoon-fed information they will simply not learn it. When I was an undergraduate it was not un-known for us to be told to research a topic or to go read a book in our own time and then to be examined on that topic. That just doesn’t happen anymore in the science faculty. A worse effect of this is that if something is challenging students just don’t bother with it. They then do poorly in the exam and because of the pressure to keep pass rates up the challenging stuff is just removed from the courses.

This however has an immensely negative effect on the good students in the class because they go un-challenged, get bored and either under achieve or transfer somewhere they won’t be bored or worse still, drop out.

Conclusion

When you consider that everyone is being forced through what used to be the elite honours course without weak students being failed, that 25% of first year has disappeared into the ether and the pressure on departments is to pass pass pass students, how could standards NOT plummet!

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