The curse of the course

Beware of your metaphors, for they shall make you their slaves. We use metaphors so often in our everyday speech that we fail to recognise how they smuggle implications into our thinking. One example (discussed in a previous blog) is ‘stress’. Another, much used in education, is ‘course’. This word, presumably taken from horse-racing, has multiple smuggled implications. On a racecourse, all the horses start at the same line at the same time. They all jump over a pre-determined sequence of fences in the same order. They all complete the course at the same finishing line, being ranked according to the order in which they finish.

Applied to education in universities, the metaphor implies that groups of students on a course all start and finish their studies at the same time, progressing through their experience of learning in the same order and jumping over the same set of assessments. Students are ranked at the end of the course, with a mark taking the place of speed of completion. However, students who do not complete the course in the same time as others, are regarded as non-completers and fail. Lets challenge each of these smuggled implications.

In the first place, there is no need for students to start and finish a programme of study at the same time. Many people wish to study part-time, and combine university education with work. This usually means that their studies take at least twice as long as a full-time student. Many part-time students are mature and have families. They are therefore more likely to need a break of studies because of childbirth, change of employment , and so on. This is administratively inconvenient for universities, but part-time study may soon be the only way in which many people are able to pay for their studies. Part-time study has another advantage: academic education can be dovetailed with vocational training, also enabling students to apply their increased skills to the workplace and increase their productivity. Universities began, and largely continue to be, places where people are educated into the knowledge, skill and values required for particular occupations. But the domination of full-time study in British universities has split vocational education from vocations. As a result, employers complain that graduates lack the basic skills needed to perform their work, while many graduates fail to find employment appropriate to subjects they have studied for three or more years.

Secondly, not all students need to follow the same sequence of learning materials. In many areas of knowledge, some subjects do indeed have to be understood in sequence (the ‘building block approach’). But this is not always true. In many of the programmes and modules I have taught, much of the material could be studied in any order. Other approaches to learning require students first attain an overall (if rather simplified) perspective of the subject before studying a series of individual areas in more detail, leading to their developing a greater understanding of its complexity. In such cases, students need a shared introduction to the subject and in some cases a shared conclusion, but can explore the remainder of the curriculum in any order at their own pace.

Thirdly, ability should not be confused with speed of completion. Some people just take longer to learn, but are as capable at the end of their studies as the fast finishers. Why should they be penalised or categorised as failures because they take six months longer to acquire the necessary skills, knowledge and values than the average student? One reason is that universities do not have a defined threshold of skills etc which students should attain. Instead, they rank students at completion of their course by ‘first honours’, ‘upper second’ and so on. Yet this ranking system has become increasingly meaningless because of grade inflation. In the last 10 years in England, the proportion of students awarded a first honours has doubled, while another 60% now receive an upper second. This has happened at a time when the proportion of school-leavers entering universities has increased substantially and teaching hours per university student have decreased.

Why is the metaphor of the course still so dominant in British higher education? One reason is that it is convenient for universities and for the government agencies that fund them. Full-time students can all be processed efficiently on a three-year conveyor belt, exams can all be set at the same time for all, and universities can be freed from the difficult business of co-ordinating academic and vocational education with employers. Governments can fund universities using a simple block grant based on the assumption that the great majority of students are full-time. Indeed, the current funding system in England disadvantages part-time students.

Yet there are types of university education which does not correspond to the course metaphor. Professional training degrees (such as in medicine, nursing, social work and the professions allied to medicine) require students to complete part of their training in hospitals and other workplaces, where they acquire skills under the supervision of senior professionals in health and social services who have been co-opted into university education. Degrees of this kind also aim to produce students who meet a defined standard of professional competence, rather than rank them by the marks they achieve on their assignments.

This model could be expanded to other degree programmes. Then, instead of students being given a general education with limited vocational training followed by employment in a lowly administrative post, they could get a job and study for a vocational qualification part-time. This would probably require more distance learning, but we have excellent institutions in this country which can provide this. It would also free up large areas of our cities which have been given over for student rentals and are occupied for only 30 weeks each year. This would have the very useful side-effect of doing something practical to reduce homelessness.

See: My life as a steam engine