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Posted May 28, 2013

English Students Getting Less Face-to-Face Time

Many students studying for a degree in English are now beginning to complain that they are not getting their monies worth in comparison to those studying for degrees in the sciences. A deeper investigation into these claims would in fact reveal a large amount of disparity between the total hours spent in face-to-face lessons with teachers, and with the amount of additional resources and aid given to their learning. In effect many students are left feeling like they are paying large sums of money to study on their own.

A Closer Look at the Numbers

One student who is studying English at UCL says that she spends just 8.5 hours per week in tutorials, seminars and lectures, compared with 20 to 28 hours for those studying for a degree in the sciences. This realization has led a number of students to become extremely infuriated at the situation, and left wondering how this could be fair when the fees are the same.

The Guardian’s league table figures indicate that contact time for English at the top performing universities is in fact as low as 11% at UCL, 13% at Cambridge and Durham, and 15% at Oxford and St Andrews.
 

Is All Contact Time of Equal Value?
 

Whilst it may be easy to look at the figures in comparison to other subjects and assume that English students are getting a rotten deal, many lecturers and English teachers would argue that the subject is much more complex than that and that a 2 hour lecture may take 10 hours to prepare, and the value of the information may be extremely high. Each subject operates in a different way and it is almost nonsensical to compare like for like across a broad range of subject types. It is always argued that it is not the quantity of contact hours that counts, but the quality.
 

It seems clear that with funding cuts set to continue, students are unlikely to see a rise in contact hours, especially in the arts, so for now at least, students enrolling for an English degree will have to come to terms with the fact that they will receive less direct teaching than in other subjects, but that this does by no means imply that they are not receiving a high level of education. English involves much more private reading, and time to develop an understanding of texts and concepts, all of which is done during private study, whereas sciences involve much more direct information dissemination from teachers to students.
 

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