ANU subjects ranking quite well

Mr Evil said :

Yeah, but like, it still sucks.

I mean you can’t even get a coffee in Canberra on a Sunday, and I always wear my best dinner gown to lectures, but like, no one even talks to me!

haha, yeah the rankings may improve if the blow-ins bothered to plug their brains in. No wonder they can’t find coffee on Sunday, they can’t even figure out their own campus.

https://www.facebook.com/ANUILS/posts/521389257896699 – couldn’t get the name of a very well known building, named after a famous historian correct! Should be Manning Clarke Centre.

aussieboy said :

Without a decent benchmarking system for undergraduate course quality, class sizes and student engagement/satisfaction, this harmful focus on research is inescapable.

To some extent that benchmarking does exist in the form of the national Course Experience Questionnaire, but it is only at the level of an entire degree program so you can’t pick out individual teachers.

ANU graduates who had bad experiences years ago might be pleased to know that the feedback situation has improved a bit. Up until quite recently, the course surveys that students completed were for the individual lecturer/tutor’s feedback only, so naturally the worst academics just ignored them. They’ve been replaced by the Student Experience of Learning and Teaching survey, and lecturers/tutors are actually required to account for poor performance.

I have mixed feelings about creeping managerialism and cults of performance measurement, but this seems like a step in the right direction.

dungfungus said :

Is that the one that was boosting English pass marks for non-resident students?

Who knows (/who cares)?

It’s consistently rated the best in undergraduate surveys and bench marking.

*latter year economics course.

😀 Woohoo! Nice job, ANU!

BimboGeek said :

Not music, though. 🙁

But yes. That.

aussieboy said :

These rankings are the scourge of our education system. Sure, they attract international $$$ and make the “ANU” acronym look great on your CV, but they say nothing about the quality of education.

They are 100% based on ANU’s research output and the qualifications of the university’s academics.

In the classroom these same researchers, while intellectually brilliant, are anything but world class. Many of them can’t speak English fluently, have incredibly poor social skills and a demeanor more boring than Harry Potter’s Professor Binns.

Meanwhile, our fantastic teachers get no recognition and face being sacked with each round of cuts. These are the ones who get to know the names of the students, set interesting assignments, integrate jokes and real world examples into their lectures, provide rich online materials and themselves get involved in leading co-curriculars.

It doesn’t take a genius to teach microeconomics 101, but ANU insists that nobody less than one of its academic geniuses would be able to achieve its goal (cough, excuse) of “research-led education”.

Without a decent benchmarking system for undergraduate course quality, class sizes and student engagement/satisfaction, this harmful focus on research is inescapable.

And for those who are interested, the best university in Australia in terms of undergraduate education is actually the University of Wollongong.

Good call actually. I only had a couple of really good lecturers to balance out a great many very poor ones. There were a few who essentially had the attitude “f*ck you guys, go teach yourselves”.

One in particular stands out though – an Economics lecturer who deliberately failed half of a class in a latter year Economics because he didn’t like teaching and wanted to be taken off this particular class.
He was actually was giving out *negative* marks to some in one piece of assessment which I’m rather sure isn’t meant to happen.
He got taken off teaching that class after that, but there was no review of the way people were assessed despite a ton of appeals, and the College of Business and Economics basically defended the marks till the bitter end while at the same time effectively acknowledging there was a problem by replacing the lecturer.
A great number of people wrongfully ended up with a fail on their transcript and had to come back a year later instead of graduating, completely screwing up their lives all because a bitter old man didn’t like teaching Macroeconomics.
(And to head it off: if a class with historic 20% failure rate suddenly has a 50% failure rate, it’s not anything to do with the students whatsoever)
The whole thing was a joke frankly, ANU treats undergrads with contempt.

aussieboy said :

These rankings are the scourge of our education system. Sure, they attract international $$$ and make the “ANU” acronym look great on your CV, but they say nothing about the quality of education.

They are 100% based on ANU’s research output and the qualifications of the university’s academics.

In the classroom these same researchers, while intellectually brilliant, are anything but world class. Many of them can’t speak English fluently, have incredibly poor social skills and a demeanor more boring than Harry Potter’s Professor Binns.

Meanwhile, our fantastic teachers get no recognition and face being sacked with each round of cuts. These are the ones who get to know the names of the students, set interesting assignments, integrate jokes and real world examples into their lectures, provide rich online materials and themselves get involved in leading co-curriculars.

It doesn’t take a genius to teach microeconomics 101, but ANU insists that nobody less than one of its academic geniuses would be able to achieve its goal (cough, excuse) of “research-led education”.

Without a decent benchmarking system for undergraduate course quality, class sizes and student engagement/satisfaction, this harmful focus on research is inescapable.

And for those who are interested, the best university in Australia in terms of undergraduate education is actually the University of Wollongong.

Is that the one that was boosting English pass marks for non-resident students?

These rankings are the scourge of our education system. Sure, they attract international $$$ and make the “ANU” acronym look great on your CV, but they say nothing about the quality of education.

They are 100% based on ANU’s research output and the qualifications of the university’s academics.

In the classroom these same researchers, while intellectually brilliant, are anything but world class. Many of them can’t speak English fluently, have incredibly poor social skills and a demeanor more boring than Harry Potter’s Professor Binns.

Meanwhile, our fantastic teachers get no recognition and face being sacked with each round of cuts. These are the ones who get to know the names of the students, set interesting assignments, integrate jokes and real world examples into their lectures, provide rich online materials and themselves get involved in leading co-curriculars.

It doesn’t take a genius to teach microeconomics 101, but ANU insists that nobody less than one of its academic geniuses would be able to achieve its goal (cough, excuse) of “research-led education”.

Without a decent benchmarking system for undergraduate course quality, class sizes and student engagement/satisfaction, this harmful focus on research is inescapable.

And for those who are interested, the best university in Australia in terms of undergraduate education is actually the University of Wollongong.

Yeah, great. But what about UC?!? 🙂

Yeah, but like, it still sucks.

I mean you can’t even get a coffee in Canberra on a Sunday, and I always wear my best dinner gown to lectures, but like, no one even talks to me!