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Class Experience

Postby Guest on Mon Mar 07, 2011 5:13 pm

Hi everyone,

I'm a JSA and was really excited about having classes here since I would be taking Honors levels.
However, the general mood in one of my classes is indifference. People text during tutorial and take a while to quiet down to hear what the professor is saying or start packing up before the lesson is finished.

Is that unusual or typical? :(
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Hennessy on Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:29 pm

What course are you taking?


Plus side is you usually score points with the professor for actually listening and taking part. I hated the fact that lots of my tutorials/seminars nobody would say anything or get involved, it made the tut drag on so. I blame the scientifically proven correlation between high intelligence and a total lack of social skills which I've just invented based upon my own non-scientific experiences.

Employ that famous American work-ethic and enthusiasm and you might well rouse your classmates from their shy or ignorant stupor.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby LonelyPilgrim on Sat Mar 12, 2011 8:05 am

Never underestimate the invigorating effect of arguing with your tutor. Rollicking disagreements loosen tongues.
Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova
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Re: Class Experience

Postby MelissaL on Mon Mar 21, 2011 7:48 pm

This is a problem common for us serious students. I think us Americans tend to be more aware in class as we have to pay tuition to attend to university. I'm a PG here, but at my undergrad uni a group of us actually campaigned about proper classroom etiquette by posting leaflets about. I find it's best to sit up front so that you can hear better and are less distracted. I still give out glares in seminars when people are disrespectful.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby what on Mon Mar 21, 2011 8:25 pm

I think us Americans tend to be more aware in class as we have to pay tuition to attend to university.


As do the English, Welsh and Northern Irish, alongside any other non-European country
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Guest on Thu Mar 24, 2011 9:32 am

why do you feel the need to jump on the tuition fee band wagon. I'm Scottish and I don't pay fees so does that mean I don't deserve the same education as those who have to pay for it? This argument is ridiculous and if I didn't have the grades to come here then I wouldn't be here.

Stop this tuition fee moan.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby MelissaL on Thu Mar 24, 2011 5:31 pm

I didn't mean to offend, but simply meant that I had lots of friends who had to pay for university and so want to get their money's worth. I was on a full scholarship for undergrad myself so didn't have to pay back then, but I still hated other students goofing off and being distracting during classes when so many of us simply wanted to learn.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby hannahd on Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:54 pm

Yeah, money doesn't really have much to do with this argument. I'm Scottish and I know plenty of others too who become angry when people talk/text/play on facebook in lectures. This comment will probably infuriate many when I say this, but I have experienced this problem much less in the scientific lectures than in arts lectures. But it's the truth! :)
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Re: Class Experience

Postby RedCelt69 on Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:35 pm

The other day, a philosophy lecture was made all non-philosophic by the guy infront of me spending the entire time playing Solitaire on his notebook. Actually, that's not fair. He interrupted his hour-long Solitaire session to check out Facebook a couple of times.

If these people have no interest in actually absorbing the information being offered, why the hell do they turn up and distract those that do?
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Guest on Sun Mar 27, 2011 12:13 am

RedCelt69 wrote:The other day, a philosophy lecture was made all non-philosophic by the guy infront of me spending the entire time playing Solitaire on his notebook. Actually, that's not fair. He interrupted his hour-long Solitaire session to check out Facebook a couple of times.

If these people have no interest in actually absorbing the information being offered, why the hell do they turn up and distract those that do?


Cos they can't get jobs?
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Guest on Mon Mar 28, 2011 2:43 pm

I'm Scottish. It's nothing to do with tuition fees (seriously, wtf? We are all here on borrowed money). We all know the problem and I think we're skirting round it. There are people here who were socially pressured into doing a degree, simply felt that it'd be a good qualification to have or maybe didn't have a clue what they wanted to do after school. University is, for some people, an easy and fun alternative to getting a job straight away [which is harder without a degree anyway]. Anybody can do a degree given that they do well at school (isn't usually hard unless you did IB) and can apply for a loan. Don't be surprised that this system produces undergraduates with no real drive or ambition. And this also goes some way to explain why a larger percentage of these people are found in the arts degrees. Often, arts degrees are seen as an easy option. Do not despair however, artists, for these people are simply doing you a favour by lowering the grade average and making you look better. I wish we had some numpties in Biochem to do the same for us!
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Jormungand on Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:06 pm

It's pretty much par for the course based on my experience of philosophy and modern/mediaeval history. Not much you can do, really - find the people who are also interested, chat to them outside of class, otherwise just get on with it. Your time is your time and their time is theirs *shrug*
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Guest on Thu Apr 07, 2011 4:30 pm

Actually, you shouldn't discount cost of tuition as a motivator. Overseas students are paying 3x as much as students from England. That's a lot. So 'everyone is paying fees' is not necessarily a good counter-argument. And I assume these overseas fee-payers are speaking from personal experience, and I'm sure they do in fact have much more motivation. That's just what I've observed from teach tutorials though.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Guest2 on Sat May 21, 2011 5:12 pm

Everyone's paying for their education in some way or another, either directly or through taxes. And most students at St Andrews (especially those from the UK) are putting themselves in a substantial amount of debt by going to university, regardless of how much they pay or don't pay in tuition fees. I can't say I ever noticed people texting during tutorials during my time in St Andrews, but I did notice that the North American students talked more whereas everyone else was more reserved, but not distracting. That was something that baffled and sometimes frustrated the study abroad people, but it's really just a difference in cultures and academic backgrounds. North Americans tend to speak more freely in class because it's more encouraged in the schools they come from, and because they tend to feel less of a need to back up their comments with specific evidence. Not meant to be a dig, just something that became apparent to me as a North American student there adjusting to the system. Actually, in lectures I remember it being the Americans who tended to play Snood or check Facebook in lectures, because usually it was only the Americans who brought their laptops for "note taking." I suppose it depends on the tutorial and subject how much people are texting and doing unrelated things. In any case, from my own experience alone I think that the issue boils down to a difference in universities' attitudes towards students. St Andrews considers its students to be adults and expects them to make their own decisions for the most part, leaving it up to the individual student to carve out his or her own university experience, for better or worse. American universities seem to be more involved, thinking of themselves as institutions that usher youths into adulthood. So that means that comportment as well as academic ability becomes an important and even assessed part of the curriculum. I don't know which system is better or worse - I suppose it depends on what works for individual students - but my advice to the OP would be to ignore those not taking their degrees seriously, and simply put your efforts into your own studies. It's unfortunate that it's distracting, but realistically you should be doing the vast bulk of your learning (assuming you're in honours-level arts modules) on your own, outside the classroom, so try not to worry about not getting everything you possibly can from your tutorials. For me, the value of tutorial sessions was in seeing how other people were approaching the issue, getting an idea of where I stood in scholarly debates as well as in the marking curve. But the most useful element of the tutorial system, for me, was the relationship with my tutors - emailing them with questions, asking for reading recommendations, discussing my essays, etc. So if you feel that something hasn't been discussed adequately in the tutorial, just ask your tutor about it or email him/her. In my experience they were always happy to help.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Cinema on Sun Dec 25, 2011 9:54 pm

This is brought up time and time again. The basic point here people tend to miss: though everyone is paying, North Americans are paying a lot more than everyone else. They also don't have the institutional debt-structure that the UK does. It is much more personal, and as a result, probably plays out more in how much they want from their education. Seen both systems, there is a big difference, which people in these arguments tend to try and mitigate (but why?).
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Delts on Mon Dec 26, 2011 2:35 pm

You've really gone full necromancer on us, haven't you Cinema. Well done.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby ELysistrata on Mon Dec 26, 2011 2:36 pm

FYI, poster above (Guest 2?), there is no marking curve in St Andrews. Marks are each given on their own merit and are not compared to or altered by the achievement of any other student.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Cinema on Mon Dec 26, 2011 5:33 pm

Delts wrote:You've really gone full necromancer on us, haven't you Cinema. Well done.


RISE MY MINIONS, RIIIIIIIIIISEEEEEE!
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Re: Class Experience

Postby The Cellar Bar on Tue Dec 27, 2011 5:20 am

still scunners the hell out of me that apparently tutors and lecturers don't actually have the balls to take said notebooks and mobiles and the like and fling them into the nearest waste-bin when they find that some clowns are wasting their ( the tutors) time. Or at least suggesting that said clowns' time might be better spent/wasted doing it some place else!

The other point would be that there does seem to be a perception among some of the American students that the onus is on the University to "guide" students through their education. Not in the traditional perceived "Scottish" way of doing it - by challenging students to think for themselves - but assist in the passing of challenges like essays by asssting in the drafting and redrafting of a piece of work until it is in a fit state to actually be marked! And that is where the "I'm paying for a degree here so how come "staff" aren't doing that for me?" seems to come from.

Which sort of falls into the same sort of category as "Advice to Tutors" - if someone does object to an idiot behaving like that in a class, why not raise it there and then on the spot - and make a sufficient noise and fuss about it to the idiot concerned that something is done about it. Rather than sit passively around waiting for some solution to it being reached some other way.
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Re: Class Experience

Postby Cinema on Fri Apr 13, 2012 11:32 am

ELysistrata wrote:FYI, poster above (Guest 2?), there is no marking curve in St Andrews. Marks are each given on their own merit and are not compared to or altered by the achievement of any other student.


Not an externally-imposed curve, but a curve naturally emerges as you cannot avoid comparing a paper to the one that came before and after it (as well as the general trends you find in assignments).
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