Thursday, January 15, 2009

Yet Another Survey

As if the National Student Survey, our own Viewfinder and Barometer surveys were not enough, the Tmes Higher has weighed in with yet another on student experience.

The difference with this one is that the attributes being assessed were identified by students themselves, and the weighting applied to these attributes was based on how important they were to students.

So where did we come? Staffs Uni is ranked 73rd out of the 101 insitutions included. Comparing our individual scores in each category, we are equal to or above the average in "good student union", "good support/welfare", "good persoanl relationships with teaching staff", "cheap shop/bar", "tuition in small groups", "good library and opening hours" and "fair workload".

We don't do so well on social life, nor on thefactors relating to quality of courses and teaching.

On the plus side, we scored better than Brunel, de Montfort, Coventry, John Moores, Wolverhampton, and even LSE!

Full details here.

A New Book on Plagiarism

Reviewed in this week's Times Higher is "Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis" by Diane Pecorari.

The book covers the alarm about plagiarism in HE and details the systems put into place to combat the problem. The author's response though is that the solution is through the pedagogic approach to be taken by lecturers - essentially how can we teach our way out of the problem?

Even without reading the book, there are plenty of thought proviking ideas in the review itself - the review can be found here.