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Exeposé
Monday 9 May 2011 Issue 579 www.exepose.com
Free
81% say £9k is poor value Photo: Henry White
Joe Johnston News Editor
OVER 81 per cent of home undergraduates disagree that an Exeter University degree is worth £9,000 per year, according to an Exeposé survey. The results come just a few months after the University announced a trebling in fees to £9,000 for UK/EU students starting in 2012. The sample group of students were asked if they agree that their academic university experience is worth £3,375 per year to which only 57 per cent agreed, and when asked if it is worth £9,000 an overwhelming 81 per cent disagreed. Over half of the anonymous respondents disagreed that their contact hours provide good value for money, and 57 per cent stated that they are not happy with the number of contact hours they receive per week. A third year Engineering student commented, “My course involves more contact hours than many others, but for arts courses where students may have as little as three hours contact a week, to pay £9,000 is ridiculous. Even for my higher number of contact hours, I still don’t feel £9,000 is justified.” Some 48 per cent of respondents would not have chosen to study at Exeter if they had faced fees at that level when they applied, with almost half of those saying that they do not think they could have afforded to go to university at all. A third year English student stated, “£40,000 of debt would have put me off. And I know that you get a loan, you don’t pay up-front, but that doesn’t mean the debt goes away. I probably would have chosen not to go to university.” 39 per cent of those surveyed would have reconsidered which course to study if fees had been set at £9,000 when they applied, with over half of those saying they would not have been able to afford
Cheating increases
Charlie Marchant Senior Reporter
University, said in response to the survey: “In one sense it isn’t surprising that students who have paid just over £3,000 fees wouldn’t want to pay £9,000.
129 EXETER students were found guilty of cheating in their exams last year. This figure is a significant increase on the 34 students found guilty in 2008/9 and the four students in 2007/8. Figures from the University reveal the Business School as having the most students guilty of academic misconduct: 102 in the past ten years. The School of Biosciences had 34 guilty students and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences 23 in the past ten years. In 2009/10, 84 students from the Business School were accused of an exam offence and 76 of these were found guilty. The majority of offences were for breaching exam hall procedures. Neil Abel, the Business School’s Head of Education and Student Services, commented, “This is still a large number of misconduct cases, and we do take this very seriously. Of these students more than 90 per cent were international students and more than 75 per cent were in their first year of study here. We therefore believe that this high figure may be partly explained by unfamiliarity with the rules and protocols of exams in a UK university.” Jonathan Barry, Associate Professor in History and chair of Review Panels that decide the outcomes of the cases of academic misconduct, said, “Every year we have excluded from the University, or refused to grant degrees to, at least one student (often several), if they have been found guilty of severe cheating such as extensive plagiarism or asking another student to impersonate them in an exam.”
Continued on page 3
Continued on page 3
Hundreds of thousands of students protested across the UK over the rise in tuition fees the length of the course. A third year English student commented, “Studying a humanities degree, with such poor graduate job prospects, would not seem prudent. If degrees cost that much they cease to be about doing
what you love, and start to be about getting a degree that gives you good job prospects. And anyone who says otherwise speaks from great privilege.” Professor Janice Kay, Deputy Vice Chancellor in charge of education at the