Academics Fight Class Size Proposal

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 1, 2007

Anna Patty and Harriet Alexander

UNIVERSITY standards for honours and PhD graduates have fallen, argue academics who say they are being encouraged to inflate student grades and teach bigger classes.

Lecturers at the University of NSW said they were being encouraged to give 40 per cent of honours students in the arts and social science faculty a first-class degree.

The proportion of students graduating with honours compared to those who pass without them in the University of Sydney's veterinary science faculty has also reversed over the past 20 years.

Graduation booklets from the 1980s show that only one-third of students passed the course with honours, but now only one-third graduate without honours.

Meanwhile, lecturers in the arts and social science faculty at the University of NSW are fighting a proposal that would reward them for teaching bigger classes.

The Workload Allocation Model, which has been rejected by staff, would measure their performance according to the number of students they teach as opposed to the number of hours.

Ralph Hall, who teaches social science, was one of 58 academics who voted against the proposal being pushed by the faculty's dean, James Donald.

"It penalises heavily any staff that teach classes of less than 100 students and deteriorates the quality of teaching," Professor Hall said.

Another lecturer said tutorial classes had grown in size from a maximum of 15 to a minimum of 25 students, since the early '90s.

Lecturers in the arts and social science faculty who supervise honours and Phd students said they were also being encouraged to award first-class honours to the top 40 per cent of students.

Guidelines issued to staff say that students who receive a mark of 85 and above, qualifying them for first-class honours, "will be in the top 40 per cent".

A lecturer from the arts faculty, who did not want to be named, told the Herald that employers were starting to question the quality of graduates. "We are giving students the marks they need to get into a PhD even if they don't deserve them," he said.

The faculty receives additional Federal Government funding for each postgraduate student. Professor Hall said there had been some grade inflation as a result of Government guidelines for how postgraduate scholarships are awarded.

The acting faculty dean, Stephen Fortescue, said it was clear staff did not like the workload proposal and the faculty was talking to staff about how it could be modified.

He said the faculty "would be the laughing stock of the country" if it gave 40 per cent of students first-class honours degrees.

The Greens education spokesman, John Kaye, said the Workload Allocation Model was deeply flawed and would punish small-class teaching. "It is a victory for cost cutting at the expense of educational outcomes," he said.

Sydney University academics say that as Government funding has dwindled, the veterinary science faculty has had to rely on tuition fees, providing an incentive to pass students and pushing the mark distribution to the right.

But Rosanne Taylor, the faculty's associate dean for learning and teaching, said the quality of students had much improved over the past 20 years as the entrance mark had risen. From next year, students would need to complete an extra research component to qualify for honours.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home