Dear Prifysgol Caerdydd:

Two things. (or maybe three)

1. If you are going to decide what is a fair or reasonable amount of work for a 10 credit course, and give this a value in page numbers in a handbook, please advise your professors that that page number is meant to signify assignments of a certain size which should equate to a fair and reasonable amount of work. Please tell them that giving much larger topics than can be adequately covered in that page length, and then “letting” students go over it “some” without penalty because the topic is too big defeats the entire purpose. They may also be interested to know that, in addition to defeating the purpose, it is worse than just having longer page requirements because students must not only meet the specs of the assignment, but then spend hours creatively wordsmithing and whittling away important bits of argument to get it down to “nearly” assigned number of pages.

2. If you are going to create a class in which a group research project is the entire assignment, with findings to be presented orally to the class and submitted in a written report, please don’t then at the last minute tell them that the presentation is entirely ungraded because so many people mess it up and its really just for good practice in presenting out loud. Especially if some students are freaking adults who have spoken in public a time or two and who have put in the hours of preparation they know are the way to make it go smoothly.

3. Also, in that group project class, please please please find some way to judge individual students on their work and not give everyone in a group the same grade with no way to distinguish who did what or, (as has been the case in two out of three groups examined through participatory research by this author) who did nothing at all or did a thing so badly that it had to be redone last minute by other group members. While it is clear that you mean to give a “real world” experience of team project work and peer motivation, please note that students are not given hiring or firing choice in this scenario, nor is there the option, which may exist in some real world situations, to just give the lazy person a section and let them sink or swim and have their job depend on it. The class project scenario encourages what your fine institution has taught me to identify as “free rider” problems. Lesser students know that students who care about anything will not let the project fail, and that the professor cannot back down from the single-group-grade/motivate-your-peers platform, and so there is really nothing other group members can do except get it done while they stare into space (or in a hypothetical situation, at the clock, while the real students hack away at his writing, letting him squirm because they know he’s scheduled to be out drinking and that he’s useless in the room, but that they are not about to set him free until it’s done and up to snuff.) On the other hand, it does allow dedicated, hardworking students to realize how much better they are than the rest of the world. And they know this holds some kind of value, somewhere. Or at least they can hope.