Give me back my twelve quid: the great tutorial swindle

There seems to be a growing trend amongst humanities lecturers to teach their tutorials through the medium of student-led presentations. It’s not exactly surprising, seeing as there is a particular benefit to these lecturers which no other teaching method can offer: they don’t actually have to do anything. The premise of a tutorial taken in this way is simple; each week one or more students prepares a presentation on a given topic, then delivers it haltingly to the class and poorly fields questions on the subject afterwards. Meanwhile, the lecturer looks on with mild disappointment, making the occasional scribble on his notepad.

The ability to present is of course a vital life skill, especially for the 99% of history students who dream of working in the City rather than being history teachers. As such, an activity which promotes presentation skills would be an excellent addition to any humanities, or indeed science, course. What’s happened here though, is that this activity has replaced half of the actual course. The main purpose, one might think, of a history course is to learn history. For a standard humanities module though, you will receive a mighty two contact hours a week: a one-hour lecture and a one-hour tutorial; a quick bit of maths on the back of a napkin tells me that, based on a standard six module course for a UK/EU student, each one of those contact hours costs just a shade over £12 currently (although this will rise to £34/hour for students starting this September).

So every week I pay more than the cost of 12 magic bus rides for the privilege of listening to some dolt who doesn’t even have a degree lecturing me on the article we both read at twelve ‘o’ clock last night on our phones in the 5th Ave toilets. Even worse is when that dolt is me, and I have to stand up and deliver a presentation to a room full of people who know precisely as little as I do about the topic, on account of the fact that we thought there was the off-chance somebody who does know about it would have taught us at some point during our university course.

There’s a qualified lecturer sitting right there, who knows everything there is to know about post-colonial cheese consumption levels in the Congo (or whatever), often he or she will even have a PhD in that very topic. Yet we are given this one hour each week to have face-to-face time with them and instead I have to listen to a hung-over, unwashed student stutter their way through a word-for-word recapitulation of the same book everybody there has read. That is, until they get nervous half way through, forget everything and abruptly end the presentation mid-sentence.

How in the world does anybody think this is acceptable? Imagine if you paid £13 to go to a guest presentation and the speaker just sat there whilst a member of the audience delivered a pisspoor speech instead. You would be livid. Yet because we are told that it is developing important life skills, it’s supposed to be OK that we accept the same thing from our lecturers. Of course, there are those occasions where you look forward to the student presentations solely because the lecturer’s English is so poor that nobody can understand a damn thing they’re saying, but that’s another matter entirely.

Enough with the student presentations already. We spend 90 percent of every course teaching ourselves anyway, it’s not unreasonable to expect that for a single hour a week you might bloody teach US something.

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