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University Reform

A Couple of issues ago, we made a suggestion that the resolution to the Senate asking for a review of the present university set-up in N.Z. could well be implemented.

One small matter which the Students Association might do well to press for is the overhaul of regulations regarding the keeping of terms.

Present VUC regulations say that students must keep terms in all subjects for practically all degrees. This entails compulsory attendance—in theory anyway, at a certain proportion of the lectures.

Why?

We can think of no good reason for this regulation. Without allowing the admitted iniquities of the extra mural student system, it should be possible so to arrange the regulation that attendance at lectures is not compulsory. In fact, the increasing scope of internal exams, which in themselves put emphasis on the particular viewpoints of lecturers and professors, would ensure that students would do well from the purely utilitarian aspect, to attend lectures in order to pass exams. There may have been arguments when all exams were external for making terms restricted in this way. But now that students do have to attend lectures anyway, why continue to make attendance compulsory? Make practical work compulsory by all means: [unclear: but] if a student honestly prefers not to attend some lectures, then he should be allowed to miss. If he doesn't do the work, it will become sufficiently obvious sooner or later: if he doesn't present the material in November the way the lecturer has set it out all the year, it should still be possible to see whether he has been following independent lines of research during that missed time, or whether he has just wasted it. The good student would get rewarded; the bad one would suffer.

Apart from that, it might have one or two other quite beneficial results—some lecturers might take the hint if attendance at their lectures became a little skimpy too consistently.

If voluntary attendance were the rule, then most students would continue to go to most lectures as they do now. Insistence on essays or other tangible evidence of work done would make it sure that people were keeping up to the mark.

By shifting responsibility on to individual students instead of imposing it by external regulation, there should—theoretically at any rate—be an enhancement of that self-education and voluntary discipline of learning which is—again, theoretically at any rate—the only true method of learning.

It would be worth the experiment at VUC: most overseas universities of repute would burst their sides laughing at the thought of rigidly restricting the right to pass to those who have attended two thirds of the lectures.

D.G.