UCL’s bloated student body, while swelling management’s pay- checks, continues to be a headache for the day-to-day running of the university. Since 2010, the univer- sity’s population has doubled, rising to an unprecedented 40,000+ full- and part-time students. This, cou- pled with management’s reluctance to hire more teaching staff, has led to students facing certain rejection from most of their module choices.
New Regulations
The whole problem is compound- ed by new regulations sent from the head honchos that demand that teaching staff are assigned spaces based on the speculative size, not actual size, of their classes. To make matters worse, students will often not find out they have been rejected by their modules until several weeks after the start of term, by which point switching modules is only slightly preferable to switching universities.
Nowhere has been hit as hard by these regulations as UCL’s flagship interdisciplinary course, Arts and Sciences BASc. Billed on the UCL website as “a bespoke programme of arts and sciences”, the course allows students to pick a range of modules from across the university’s disci- plines. However, each department prioritises places on their modules for their own students, meaning that the nomadic Arts and Science students can each face three or four rejections before settling down for what’s left of their course.
Postgrads catfished
Postgraduate students have also been left embittered by the module rejections. A large part of UCL’s ad- vertising for its Masters programmes centres on the benefits of elective modules. It is no surprise, then, that many postgrads feel they have been catfished with promises of a bespoke degree, only to end up paying hand- somely to study modules that are far from their initial choice.
The Chair-cott inquiry
It should come as a reassurance that UCL have noted the boom in student numbers as an issue in their “2016-2021 Education Strategy” manifesto: “accommodating a grow- ing student body,” it concedes, “is a major challenge”. However, it ap- pears that management are more con- cerned about the state of the univer- sity’s chairs than they are about the student population: an investigation into how furniture impacts teaching and learning has been commissioned for 2018, and deemed one of the uni- versity’s “most pressing problems”. A review of the module system, on the other hand, has been relegated to the distant date of 2021.