Has anyone ever complained about a lecturer?

Indie_Kid

kai666 wrote: »

unless things have changed since my degree, lectures are only supposed to give you an overview of the subject, then you go and do you're own additional reading. Following only the lectures would give you no more than a third.

My degree is like this. We do get additional reading to do as well. However, one of the things we're meant to do for our project, we haven't been taught and isn't in the core reading book.

babyboom_2

Nope, What I did was study more if ever I can't understand on what the teacher was trying to impart to us,( during my college days) or raised questions for the vague part of the lecture , that way the teacher can elaborate more on that particular subject.

Indie_Kid

babyboom wrote: »

Nope, What I did was study more if ever I can't understand on what the teacher was trying to impart to us,( during my college days) or raised questions for the vague part of the lecture , that way the teacher can elaborate more on that particular subject.

A lecturer of mine allows people to ask questions in the lecture.

khublaikhan

You can ask questions within the lecture and the whole point of the tutorial is to go through the stuff in the lecture in more detail. If you do not finish the material in the tutorial then you can ask to meet the lecturer at a mutually convenient time and go through specific questions plus take it as homework.

For every one hour spent at Uni you should do at least double that as your own study time:

1 hr lecture plus 1 hr tutorial = 2hrs on a module in Uni, therefore, a MINIMUM of 4 hours study at home for this module

However, if you cannot even understand what the lecturer is saying due to language difficulties then you are in trouble imo.

melancholly

Adro wrote: »

Start a petition.

If you can get the majority of your class to put their names forward as an official complaint, you have a better chance of getting things sorted.

If they still don't take any action, at least you have some kind of solid evidence showing that people in your class have complained about the teaching. When your exam comes, if everyone fails, you can pull the "I told you so" card.

Personally, I would keep going over people's heads until I find someone who's going to do something. Arrange a meeting with the module co-ordinator. if they don't listen then meet with the head of the academic school/department, etc.

this is a course of action that will just make the students look vindictive - especially if chosen as a first choice rather than going to the relevant committees first. going in so aggressively whilst ignoring the established channels will not get a positive response and will just mark someone's card for the rest of their degree.

incidentally, student reps not attending the meetings is shooting all students in the foot......... it removes the main method of communication. going regularly and establishing a relationship with the relevant members of staff means that when a problem comes up, they know whether or not the person voicing it is the kind of person to genuinely complain or is just whinging. you have to pick battles and trying to change everything is futile!

all unis can scale up or down marks....... most a levels do the same thing... it's just the way it happens since it's impossible to standardise questions across different topics or different years.

(OP - you had my sympathy until you complained about paying for your lecturers - that's where you lost me!)

jbreckmckye

Universities *do* take note of complaints. I know a member of staff at a shall-not-be-named-university, who told me one case a particularly dreadful lecturer being ousted from his position. Admittedly, the catalyst was the trouble he caused other members of staff by not cooperating and leaving portions of his own teaching for others, but those feedback forms do not go straight into the shredder.

That said, I think that your complaints are probably not sufficiently grave to prompt any sort of action from the faculty. We are talking about lecturers and supervisors who fail to teach portions of the curriculum, or simply refuse to mark and offer feedback on papers. A thick accent will not likely be enough.

Voyager2002

At university, YOU are responsible for your own learning. Since you have a helpful and competent tutor, ask for more book recommendations: there are any number of books on mathematical methods for scientists, and if the books recommended are not helpful, with guidance you can always find others that fit the bill.

Complaining would only lead to bad feeling -- lecturers have far better things to do than teaching, and this person's career depends on research performance rather than keeping a bunch of students happy.

jbreckmckye

At university, YOU are responsible for your own learning. Since you have a helpful and competent tutor, ask for more book recommendations: there are any number of books on mathematical methods for scientists, and if the books recommended are not helpful, with guidance you can always find others that fit the bill.

That's not really entirely true. If that were the case, Universities would offer libraries and examinations, and nothing else. The idea of providing lecturers and assuming that students will self-teach every aspect of the course is contradictory - and the fact is, undergraduates do not have the skill or experience to go through university as autodidacts.

Complaining would only lead to bad feeling -- lecturers have far better things to do than teaching, and this person's career depends on research performance rather than keeping a bunch of students happy.

Except that it doesn't. These days, teaching is a must in academia. No institution will pay you simply for research - as over ninety percent of its funding will come through HE. Even those supported by the research councils (for instance, the AHRC) will support themselves by doing some sort of teaching for their affiliate university. That's just the way it is.

Indeed, increasingly, those with an interest in an academic career should specifically seek out teaching experience during their PhD / MPhil, to secure a role further down the line.

The_One_Who

There are research-only positions which will involve very, very little teaching, if any, but I don't think these are paid quite as well as the lectureship grades. As for teaching/lectures, these are meant to provide the absolute basics and give a base to go from with reading. Although a half-decent library and a reading list will also do.

OP, follow the proper complaint procedures. Also get the student reps back to the student/staff meetings, not going isn't exactly helping things.

jbreckmckye

There are research-only positions which will involve very, very little teaching,

Possibly in the Sciences, but outside of these fields such posts just don't really come about any more. I'm sure there are a handful, but I simply don't think it's a realistic prospect to imagine that you can rely on only research-council funding post-PhD.

As for teaching/lectures, these are meant to provide the absolute basics and give a base to go from with reading. Although a half-decent library and a reading list will also do.

I would tend to say the lectures are a means of administering a reading list. They're an opportunity for those acquainted with the critical milieu to illustrate research options for the week paper / dissertation. Undergraduates cannot make those decisions, because they simply aren't familiar with recent events in research.

I don't expect a first year to guess which directions to take when dealing with the corpus of papers from the last thirty or forty years. I imagine it may be easier in the sciences (there are certain things to simply 'learn'), but in my own field (literature) that's just not possible.