On the changes to SAHC - I wrote in a different thread a month or so ago that the school was improving, and was consequently negged by someone who clearly had a chip on their shoulder.
The information from the two posters on this thread who are involved in the committees is very interesting, because only yesterday the History faculty hosted a day in which we were taken through our potential choices for next year, we also had a 'course fair' where we were given handouts detailing individual courses that we could take and where we could talk to the lecturers about the course. So that was really useful, and I do feel a lot clearer about by second year choices. They said they're going to improve this for next year aswell, as this was the first year they've done it. I can only assume that this is part of the school's concerted effort to provide the students with feedback.
Also, relating to the increase to '15/hr' contact time, when I look at the sheets I was given, it shows that several of the courses have introduced extra hours for feedback (one of them even included 1 essay feedback session per lecturer for both assessments, making 12 hours of possible academic feedback for students in the run up to assessments). Many of them are also introducing several hours during the course where they review and screen films and documentaries it looks like. One of them I got from an ancient-looking academic who didn't seem particularly interested in the whole process and he's barely provided any information at all. Haha. So it looks like we're already seeing improvements.
I also have to say that, this year the History department has been better by quite a long way than the Politics department in terms of feedback and quality of tutors in my opinion. Both departments have fantastic lecturers, but most of the Politics tutors I've encountered don't seem massively interested, whereas my History tutors have always been good thus far. This is added to the introduction of 6 new lecturers to the school - one of which we were told is an East Asian historian who previously taught, from a little research, at the University of California, Irvine (excellent US public university). We as students were also encouraged to engage in the process of choosing our future lecturers, and quite a few signed up to watch them in 30-minute lecturers on their topic areas.
I'd like to see a bit more work done by the Social Sciences department when considering the momentum of change that seems to be taking place in the SAHC.