UKC

Link to the story, which has a sample question.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31057005

Concerns a University of Sheffield, final year, economics paper. There is a sample question in the link. I reckon lots of folk on UKC we could get most of the thirty marks for this impossible question without knowing any economics.

Isn't it just 'I have paid £9 grand a year, I don't expect hard questions'?

In reply to lowersharpnose:

I thought that. Its not a perticularly hard question. Their main complaint seems to be that its maths based, but what did they expect when they chose an economics degree?

In reply to lowersharpnose:


Is unfortunately the ethos that seems to go on at my University currently.

Coupled with "I pay 9 grand, why don't I have 900 contact hours a week?"

In reply to ianstevens:

Oddly enough Ian, we are also seeing more of the 'I pay £9000, ergo I can attend when I damn well please!".

In reply to balmybaldwin:


Well, presumably to be examined on concepts and maths that they had been taught or used during their course?

The fact that the mathematics involved is pretty basic to mathematicians is not the point.

In reply to Postmanpat:



That's a very fair point.

In reply to Timmd:


However, to get accepted at these universities, and a place on one of the courses you needed other previous qualifications. Qualifications that surely would be required in conjunction with this newly garnered knowledge.

Or maybe they want slapping with a bit of common sense.

In reply to Bellie:


As the articles says, those on the joint honours course in particular may not have been required to have this level of maths. Unless we know otherwise my point stands.

I got a chemistry o-level and a history degree but I think I can safely say that if my history finals had tested my long unused o-level chemistry knowledge I would 1) Not have got a history degree 2) Been mighty pissed off.

In reply to ianstevens:
My experience is the same. Getting most students to turn up to the hours they are timetabled is a stuggle and I'm rarely pushed to service requests for extra help. We have just lost another pair of overseas students on even higher fees through persistent non-attendance under home office Tier 4 rules (where strictly they require pretty much 100% attendance).

I also agree with Postmanpat. I'd add that my own experience of mass student complaints is there is rarely 'smoke without fire' (ie miscommunication or lack of communcation or staff making daft assumptions).

In reply to Postmanpat:

The fact that the mathematics involved is pretty basic to mathematicians is not the point


I believe that this is the relevant course: -

https://www.shef.ac.uk/economics/undergraduate/degrees/modules/ecn303

If you click on the pre-requisites section, you will see that there are various mathematics modules for students with and without A level maths.
Maybe this was somehow bypassed?

In reply to Postmanpat:


But chemistry isnt a core element of history knowledge is it?

Economics is all about numbers and applied maths at its core... this shouldnt be a surprise.

Thats not to say the students shouldnt have been told to expect mathmatical questions

In reply to Offwidth:

I can't speak for other degrees at other universities, but I turned up to very few of my lectures and seminars for an entire three years, and passed the vast majority of assessments, with little extra study, with 90-100%. A complete lack of challenge ruined my motivation. I was a bit miffed to be paying £3000/year to essentially demonstrate my existing competence in the subject.

In reply to balmybaldwin:


It's a surprise if nobody has mentioned them for three years.


It should be clearly stipulated what concepts of maths they are required to be familiar with, and these should be integrated into the course to ensure that familiarity.

In reply to FactorXXX:


Sounds like either Pamela Lenton or the students have something to answer for, or quite possibly the skills studied in the maths module were never utilised in the rest of the course.

Having seen two daughters through Uni and thus experienced, second hand, lecturers who didn't turn up to lecture, tutors who didn't turn up to tute, teachers who taught things not in the course but things in the course, teachers who failed to respond to questions and examiners who examined things either not in the course or which had not been taught, I am tempted to side with the students.

In reply to Postmanpat:

Does that question even involve maths? Isn't it asking the students mostly just to discuss things that form part of a concept that has been expressed in an equation?

In reply to lowersharpnose:

I can't see their problem. They know that the exam results are adjusted to produce a set range of grades. So if everyone failed to answer that question then the grade boundaries will be adjusted down to reflect this.
Also, exams must be difficult enough to fully test the abilities of the whole group and the students are told explicitly that to get the top grade they must show further reading around the subject. So this question is really there to identify first class students.

In reply to Postmanpat:

I think, in general, the standard of university teaching is abysmal. I'd add to your list of problems the cobbling together of courses from existing modules, without adapting them to the new course at all.

How they justify charging £9k a year is beyond me; I wonder when we'll see institutes providing a reading list, maybe a few optional lectures and an exam and charging a reasonable amount for administering it.

In reply to gethin_allen:

I agree with you and Yanis on this, and disagree with PMP for once. I would have thought that at degree level you would need to do maths at the level suggested by the paper, and would be interested in learning sufficient at that level. It seems to me that both the university (for the inadequate course) and the students (for expecting an easy ride) are to blame for this. As you say, it's the hard questions that sort out the better students. In some old philosophy papers I did the questions were (obviously deliberately) famously difficult, verging on unanswerable. What the examiners were clearly looking for was how intelligently you tackled and answered the question.

In reply to lowersharpnose:

Apparently the maths complaint wasn't about the question shown. The complaint about that question was that they hadn't been taught the theory.

For the question shown, they really should be able to the maths required but you would need to have been taught the theory to be one sure of getting the right answer. You could have a good guess with out it though.

For example, the question asks students to graph consumption. Presumably this is output less coordination costs because that's all the question gives you, but there's nothing in 'basic' economics that tells you that should be the case. (actually it shouldn't unless its a conventional simplification in the economics of cities)

In reply to tehmarks:
Even as a genius you couldn't do that at my place as a good fraction of work is done partly in class and no one ever consitently got marks that high in Engineering. Even Rolls Royce sponsored part timers who were over-qualified and attended nearly all classes to get their almost inevitable 1st. Where did you study?

In reply to Yanis Nayu:

So what do you base this assertion on? NSS scores say precisly the opposite: student satisfaction on the standards of their teaching has never been higher.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:
A man with your experience should know better than such speculation based on media evidence. I'll wait until the real details are out but in the meantime I'll happily wager you a pint on the students having a case and it being nothing to do with their ability in maths. Mass complaints like this simply do not happen without good reasons.

In reply to Postmanpat:



But the Departmental Prof stated:

"Those that had mathematical content were set at a level consistent with the maths taught to all economics students, including those on dual degrees.

"All questions were based on topics taught in the course and for which further reading was provided. One question used a term that they may not have encountered previously, but to avoid any misunderstanding, the term was defined precisely in the question in terms of concepts used in the module."

So either he's being economical with the truth, or the complaining students were "asleep at the wheel". Why assume that the students' POV is the correct one?

In reply to Postmanpat:

Having also seen children through Uni, and seen the dedication, hard work and concern for their students of most of the lecturers and tutors, and having also seen students not attending lectures, not paying attention when they did and not doing the follow-up work required, then being surprised when they failed, I'd be tempted to side with the Department!

In reply to Postmanpat:

In the article, Prof Dickerson says:
"Those that had mathematical content were set at a level consistent with the maths taught to all economics students, including those on dual degrees."

So, all *should* be OK. But, the BSc students have to have A level maths, whereas, the BA ones do not, just a B or more at GCSE. This would seem to be a problem, given both groups sat the same paper.

In reply to Rob Naylor:


I said "Sounds like either Pamela Lenton or the students have something to answer for, or quite possibly the skills studied in the maths module were never utilised in the rest of the course." so I've left all possibilities open. It's just that personal experience tends me to blame the uni. It seems odd IF a whole class of students all have the same complaint.

Having said that there is also apparently a flourishing business in students making false claims against universities in order to get their money back.

In reply to lowersharpnose:


The paper will likely be marked differently for the two degrees.

In reply to Rob Naylor:

I'll tell you why I do. When I've investigated such situations on an appeal panel the Prof is normally way more trustworthy than an individual complaint but when the whole class has an issue its usually the Prof who is wrong in some way. I dont know the details here so I will wait and see. I do know pretty much everything reported by the press at my place has been inaccurate (most recently a certain UKIP fuss... which happened as both left wing and right wing students were ignoring rules and playing politics but no-one in the press posited that blindingly obvious likelihood and yet the University and Student Union was blamed for doing nothing more than being stuck between them).

In reply to lowersharpnose:
We once experimented with common maths classes with common papers for significantly different engineering courses (with different learning requirements) when forced to do so by daft management pressure in an attempt to save money. The students rightly complained en masse and that pressure stopped the stupid experiment.

As for setting a paper to be sat by two groups with different knowledge sets and marked at two levels: its hard enough to get a single level right. I'd strongly recommend not trying such a difficult idea. You can try to fix a problematically difficult exam with normalisation but this won't help the students that panicked and closed down any logical progress, or worst still left in despair.

In reply to lowersharpnose:




You're confusing entry requirements and what's taught on the course. The Prof is saying they're all taught this maths.

In reply to gethin_allen:


Entry requirements aren't relevant to how a paper gets marked. According to the Prof they all got taught the maths on the course.

In reply to Donnie:


It's not what the student goes in with it's what they are getting out of it. If one student is gaining a supposedly more valuable degree that shows a higher level of understanding (a BSc. in this case rather than the BA.) Then the grade boundaries for the BA. Will probably be lower than those for the BSc.

In reply to gethin_allen:
BA and BSc are the same level, just different fields - arts and science. Except Oxbridge (where you can buy an MA after a few years...!)

In reply to MG:


Both lower than a BEng!

In reply to lowersharpnose:

Maybe they should replace it with the much simpler question: Name all the economist that have reliably predicted the future performance any economy in the history of the dismal science.

In reply to MG:


This should be the case but in my experience of degrees where there are two versions of the same subject, like geography, the BSc is seen by many as the more valuable degree.

And when considering a maths component of such degrees I'd expect there to be more maths in a BSc than in a BA.

The Oxbridge MA thing sucks though doesn't it. I'd feel like a bit of a fraud with a gifted master when stood next to those who actually studied for it.

In reply to Rob Naylor:




Why should one assume anything when not aware of all of the facts?

Edit: That's not a dig so much as a grump about human nature.

In reply to lowersharpnose:
If you know what the definition and relevance of terms like 'coordination cost' the question looks OK.

For part a, not knowing what 'coordination cost' is but guessing from the formula and the name it sounds like a diseconony of scale.

For part b I'd have to guess consumption increases with production but decreases with coordination cost so large cities favoured when sigma/gamma grows.

Part c I'd guess peasant economy when coordination cost rises faster than production from N=1 to N=2.

For how sigma and gamma change with time I'd waffle about energy, transport, agriculture, governence, saniation, water supply factors that have allowed cities to grow from thousands to millions of inhabitants.

Does anybody know the right answers?

In reply to Stevie A:


As opposed to what used to happen which was 'the Taxpayer paid £9000 I'll go down the pub!'

In reply to gethin_allen:

Sorry, I thought you were saying that those with less rigorous entry requirements should be marked more generously. Which, obviously, isn't the case...

I don't think what you're actually saying is right either though. BA and BSc are the same level, (although Sc subjects may tend to be harder). If you have an economics module making up part of your degree, the exam will be the same and marked the same regardless of whether your final degree is classified A or Sc.

In reply to elsewhere:



Yes, I wondered if it was not having been taught these terms, rather than not understanding the maths that they were complaining about. I certainly have no idea of their formal definitions, having never done any economics theory.

However, as you say, you can work out how they behave from the formula, and guess a reasonable answer that should get some marks, rather than staring at it blankly and claiming it's impossible....