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I pay way more and I think it's really stupid too. Getting 900% in your first or 6th year on low attendance does not prove much. i think ita disrespectful to the lecturers. Some of them might not know how bad they are and if no student complains then how on earth will they change?
I stopped going to one module half way through last term on 'biology in society', but it's a really rubbish, useless module and it's the first module I've ever had where the teaching is really poor. It's one of those ones they make us do to make us 'well rounded' but a) it's a bit late by third year and b) we've had plenty of those in year 2 and 3 and c) I have no idea what relevance half of it has to anything-we spent about six lectures on 'the history of the philosophy of science' which was just utter BS. Even other lecturers won't deny it's a crap module; they've apparently only kept it because it's the 'pet module' of the guy who runs it (who is the school's head of teaching)-they're getting rid of it when he retires at the end of the year.

There was just no point in getting up for 9am only to sit there falling asleep to listen to a bad lecture. Pretty much everyone else did the same-stuck at it until we had the class test and then stopped going. Plus we know the range of essay questions we'll get in the exam, so you're better off just picking an area and doing some in depth reading into it. I talked to one masters student who said when they did it last year, they literally got up the morning of the exam and looked at some stuff on wikipedia and came out with a over 70% in the module. :rolleyes:
Im paying £3,500 roughly per year and I'm paying for the degree - a piece of paper that says I can do what I claim I can do. If I didn't need that piece of paper to get places in life I wouldn't be in university in the first place.

I go to lectures when I need to do so - if its more worthwhile staying home and carrying on with another piece of work then I will do that then go over the lecture slide online and look it up later. If I can make time I shall go to the lectures - some lectures are also incredibly boring and a lot of lecturers also do not have the enthusiasm I believe is necessary to keep lectures engaging.

I know people who go to lectures and then do nothing else and have failed with 100% attendance. They turn up, sign the register, listen to what has to be said and then they go out and get ruined. By the time the exams come around they have no real basis on which to revise from and enter panic mode whereas I have pages and pages of notes in Evernote to merge and print off giving me an entire report of notes for each module to go through and highlight and learn from.

Its nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with what best helps me in terms of time management, getting things done, my area of focus and my learning style - I struggle to learn from lectures due to my subject being very practical in its application. I learn from seeing things being done and trial and error and this helps me a lot with the theoretical side of things. These are things I am not going to learn from being sat in a lecture.

To become a computer science teacher I need the degree and I need to get the work done and understand the subject as best I can to help explain it to future generations of secondary school students. Filling in an attendance sheet is not going to help me do that at all. Understanding what helps me learn best is going to help that and them in the long run. Even if I end up with a 2:2 and understand whats going on then ill be happy if I can become a teacher (you need a 2:2 to do the PGCE). There's plenty of students who've dropped out and have had great attendance records.

I'd rather just stay at home when I need to do so and submit online.
I didn't go to all of mine, because some of them were extremely boring. I wasn't wasting petrol and time to drive there and listen to a boring lecturer talk for hours. It's hard to learn anything when you're bored. All they did was make me sleepy. I made the odd few notes, but did the majority of my learning at home. I downloaded the slides and used my own books to learn it. I was more likely to skip boring 9am lectures. I think the reason is obvious as to why.

I understand lecturers being pissed if people don't show up. I remember one of mine having a rant and telling the rest of the students to tell us that we all had to start coming in. The fact is, if your lecture is boring, people aren't going to want to go. If we're paying, I think that we have the right to decide if we show up or not. As long as you're doing the work and passing, I don't see what the issue is. I also had one lecturer that had a strong accent and it was very difficult to understand what he was saying. I ended up skipping a lot of those.

I didn't miss that many lectures in my first year, but I started to miss a lot more in the second and third years. I do remember during the exams, I saw a lot of people that I had never seen at any lectures before. They didn't even show up for the review lectures.

Original post by Pink lipstick
I pay way more and I think it's really stupid too. Getting 900% in your first or 6th year on low attendance does not prove much. i think ita disrespectful to the lecturers. Some of them might not know how bad they areand if no student complains then how on earth will they change?

If people can do well, while having a low attendance, I think that does mean something. Also, if multiple students aren't turning up to their lectures, that's probably a clue that something isn't right. If they were any good and made things more interesting, people may decide to turn up more.

Original post by heidigirl
I talked to one masters student who said when they did it last year, they literally got up the morning of the exam and looked at some stuff on wikipedia and came out with a over 70% in the module. :rolleyes:

Sounds like bull****. There's missing lectures and then there's not even trying while at home. That person was working their ass off at home.
(edited 10 years ago)
Reply 24
Original post by Pave I Ment
Doesn't make any sense to me, if you are paying 9k a year you are going to want to get your money's worth.

The entitlement thing is tosh everyone knows that you have to work its just some people are lazy its not that they think they literally can do it without working.


I've literally had people say to me that they know they're paying so much, and that they have a right to miss them if they decide to and that they don't care. It might not make sense to you but people do feel and act like that.
I'd say on average I had about a 25% attendance to lectures and seminars, and I still came out with an Economics degree and, more importantly, a job before I'd even taken my finals (a lot better than some of my more conscientious counterparts have done).

If you have the means to do well yourself, what's the point wasting your time attending? Chances are you'll never use what you learn at uni EVER AGAIN. You pay for the service, if you want to take little advantage of that service, that's your prerogative.
All our lectures are recorded and published online. Why commute two hours for a single 9 am lecture when I can listen to the lecturer read out his powerpoint from the comfort of my bed?
Reply 27
Original post by Mickey O'Neil
Its nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with what best helps me in terms of time management, getting things done, my area of focus and my learning style


^this

also if a lecturer takes issue with a low number of student attendance, they should probably reevaluate themselves first.
Lectures for my subject were beyond useless, even now some of my seminar tutors laugh whenever a certain module or two get mentioned. One compulsory module we had in second year was so awful that barely anyone turned up to the lectures, the department actually sent out an email to everyone complaining about the lack of attendance.
Original post by NathanW18
Sounds like bull****. There's missing lectures and then there's not even trying while at home. That person was working their ass off at home.


No, really, it's an utterly ridiculous module. It would be easy if it was a first year module, let alone a final year one. We've been given examples of essay questions from the past and you could easily do really well without any specific knowledge; as long as you've got a broad general knowledge and can throw in a few references to the lectures, that's all you really need. We've been told it's more about putting together a logical argument and justifying your opinions than anything else (example: 'discuss feminism as an enemy of science'. There is precisely one lecture on 'enemies of science' and the briefest of mentions of feminism, but it's really not that hard to come up with a good few relevant things to discuss just off the top of my head).
Original post by *Sarah
^this

also if a lecturer takes issue with a low number of student attendance, they should probably reevaluate themselves first.


^ THIS. One of my lecturers in first year did that. Got really mardy when he noticed that there would be ~ 30% fewer of us at his monday 2pm lecture than there was at his 11am one. Most of us didn't go to his 2pm lecture, because it was a single 1 hr stand alone lecture, for which the slides went up online on Wed anyway, and I found quite quickly that Khan academy and the textbook was a LOT more helpful than he was.
Because usually my timetable is a load of **** (e.g. 1 lecture, a 5 hour gap and then another), so I'd much rather save money from the ever increasing bus fares. Plus I study better on my own anyway, for the most part.
Reply 32
I missed every single lecture for my first module and only attended the seminars because I had to and I got 74%.
Reply 33
Two of my modules have a similar number of students on them. One module has a great lecturer who, despite very thorough online notes, makes an effort to give different examples in lectures, to spend time thoroughly explaining topics and makes sure that you actually learn something in lecture that you couldn't have learned at home. The other module, the lecturer literally reads from online notes that he didn't even write himself.

Guess which lecture is full of students and which one is basically the lecturer alone in a room. My lonely lecturer gets all self-righteous, he takes registers, he whines.

I honestly have no guilt about spending my time how I see fit. Why should I sit in a lecture to listen to you reading notes aloud.

Why other students would care whether I attend or not is completely beyond me. If anything, I'd much rather people who weren't interested in listening didn't attend. They can be really disruptive.
If you're not concentrating in lectures and not making any useful notes, then it's not really worth going is it?
Reply 35
1st and 2nd year I went to most classes, except a few 9ams (surprisingly better about early starts in 2nd year living off-campus!) and one module which was really badly taught and the lectures were running behind my seminars anyway, so I already knew te material.

3rd year in Germany I've barely been to any lectures, because 3/4 of them are at 8.15 and I have to leave my room at 7.15 to get a ridiculously crowded bus to them. Everything's online, and that early in the morning, I can barely concentrate, plus anything that's said that isn't in the notes, I'm probably not going to understand anyway. That said, I am planning to go to most of my classes next semester, but the earliest is probably going to be at 11.45.

Next year I'm commuting, so if my timetable somehow manages to cover more than 4 days, I'm scrapping whatever's on the 5th and not bothering with it. Same for if I end up with a day having only 1 hour-long lecture. As long as I make sure I catch up on the notes another time, it's really not a problem.
Reply 36
Lectures aren't even compulsory in my subject. A few of our lecturers tell us not to attend their lecturers if their teaching style doesn't suit them. So long as you do the work and keep on top of things they are happy.

I can learn more by doing the prescribed reading than I can sitting in a room for an hour with someone who can't teach, or has such a thick accent I struggle to understand them.
Original post by KJane
It's part being lazy, and a sense of entitlement that as they are paying for it, they're fully aware of what they're paying for and feel like it's not a big deal/their right to miss them.

It bugs me when friends or classmates ask me to sign them in for lectures and seminars when they can't be asked/too hungover to come in. But otherwise I don't care, they're the ones usually limited when they don't know the material for the assignments.


I don't know about your university but at my university people can get into a lot of trouble for doing that.
Some people are lazy.

Some people don't see the point.

Some people can't be bothered.

Some lecturers put up the lecture slides online so there is no point in going.

Some lectures are boring.
Reply 39
Original post by Dee Leigh
I don't know about your university but at my university people can get into a lot of trouble for doing that.


They do get in trouble, if caught. Which is why I don't do it, especially in a seminar and lecturer's have called people out on doing that.

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