Brits study less than continental cousins

British students might have less requirements but foreign students are placed within stringent quarantine for performance and are often criticized if their command of the English language are not up to par. Perhaps we should criticise if people's command of Mandarin and Hindi is not up to par. The dual system of assessment is quite apparent and one can only think that the Pound sign is more important.

I can only agree Jon, my own experience as a working class student is that the UK system places to great an emphasis on research rather than teaching. International students feel this more so and often cite a lack of contact time that they would get back home. We rely on reputation for recruitment, Chinese students still value a 'brand'. What university you go to really matters in South-East Asia. Hopefully they realise reputation is not a good marker of a good teaching experience. Our recent RAE indicates that it does not matter what university you go in the UK, there will always be quite considerable pockets of excellance. Finally the toff factories have what they deserved: a good slap round the chops! Ironically, maybe western academics will decide to move to developing countries, where teaching is considered mroe important. I know I am considering this as a serious option after my PhD.

The two previous comments are so off-beam - never mind the appalling grammar and spelling - that I wonder whether they actually bothered to read the original article. The latter simply concerns a comparison between levels of student commitment and teaching standards at European universities and those in evidence at their British counterparts. It has nothing to do with "quarantined" students from Asia or "dual systems of assessment". As an academic who is in regular contact with European higher education, I can testify that British students are infinitely less hard-working than their European counterparts in terms of class preparation. This is in spite of teaching standards at our own universities being infinitely superior to those achieved on the Continent - as my Erasmus students never fail to inform me.

@Walter, you are absolutely correct. Lest we forget, not only are there fewer contact hours, our undergraduate degrees course run for only 3 years and students are not assessed as rigorously. In the top French universities it is not uncommon to fail the majority of a first year cohort. In the UK, this would result in an inquest. Most academics will admit that UK programmes are simply not comparable. Our students are not be capable of doing fundamental science after 3 years, they are glorified technicians with poor grammar, a limited vocabulary and an inflated sense of self-worth. They represent the future of the UK.

I used to lecture at a RG uni in the UK and I'm now an academic at a university in Northern Europe which is of broadly equivalent "status". In my experience the standard of a degree in my discipline is far more demanding here than in the UK. The students cope with this by being better prepared, more motivated and harder working. My experiences match those of an earlier poster in that I've found that the quality of teaching is a little higher in the UK. However, IMO this is negated by the dumbing down. Although its not in my area I recall seeing some figures on the typical vocabulary size of a UK modern language graduate in his/her specialist foreign language. On the average it is around a half of the vocabulary size possessed by an equivalent continental modern langauges graduate. Dumbing down is a scandal and we'll pay for it in the long term.

All of which goes some way to explaining why academics elsewhere in the EU are so against the so-called Bologna process, which many see (quite rightly) as a dismantling of systems far superior to the one which (in the name of some sort of unification) they are being required to introduce. As for working habits and hours, I wonder whether it starts in the school system. Routinely, Erasmus students here seem to out-perform our own students -- and often write better English.

I would agree based on my experience that UK students are in majority quite utilitarian and generally aim for the least amount of effort. However, I am not quite sure that they put less effort than their continental peers. I have found most of the continental EU students attending our courses to be quite similar to local students. Something that stroke me as surprising, though, was that some 3rd-year Swiss, Swedish and Spanish students stated they did not understand what 'writing a critical essay' or 'doing a literature review' was because these were not requirements they had back home. Instead, university work was more problem-solving type of pieces ("company A has this problem, how would you solve it and write a report about it"). I therefore wonder whether comparisons are valid given the different nature of requirements in the first place.

Setting students work that involves solving problems ("company A has this problem, how would you solve it and write a report about it") as as an alternative rather tham a complement to 'writing a critical essay' or 'doing a literature review' sounds like a recipe for reinventing the wheel! If they cared to consult the literature, the students would often find the solutions suggested by the reading material lelevant to their field. No wonder education theorists are always telling us that students like and prefer the more practical type of exercise - it doesn't require them to know anything, read anything or engage with anything that's not either aleady in their heads or presented to them as a classroom handout.

Now wishing I could edit for typos! (as as, tham, lelevant, aleady).

David: As Michael Flanderrs used to say: "it isn't an elevant, it's a hippopotamus"!

@Walter Cairns - we know from other postings how keen you are to improve the presentation of posts on this site, so may I return the favour by suggesting that you check the definition of 'infinitely'?

David Trotter, I think you might find that the reason the Erasmus students seem to be better than the native British students is because only the best foreign students come to study in the UK. Based on the students who come from American liberal arts colleges (not even prestigious ones) to study at Oxford I should conclude that the average student at an American liberal arts college is cleverer than all but the most brilliant Oxford students. However, it is clearly the case that the students who come here from unknown US colleges are the very best students at those colleges, who perhaps didn't go to an Ivy League school because of the financial incentives on offer to be educated in their own state. These students then come to Oxford and dazzle us with their intellect, leading some to conclude that back in the States there are millions more like them, while obviously there aren't. A friend of mine from the UK has just come back from a term at a highly regarded university in another EU country, where she no doubt left many of the native students and academics with the idea that the average British student is on the verge of becoming a world-renowned authority on their field of research. Of course, this is not true: my friend was one of the few who are chosen to go on an all-expenses-paid research trip to Europe precisely because she is exceptionally brilliant. It is therefore always dangerous to judge foreign students on the basis of the ones who end up in other countries.

Alexander, although you are right about some students, there is another dynamic at play. I am a PhD student at the Univ. of Warwick. As I have a child, I live in the staff and family accommodation. My neighbors are from Russia, Pakistan, Taiwan, Germany etc. They have children 7 through 12 that have joined local state schools for a year or more whilst one of the parents studies for a postgraduate degree. The people from each of the countries mentioned above claim their children have had a holiday here in the UK. One Pakistani girl was struggling with her maths at home, and needed private tuition, and after a month of being here they promoted her to advanced group for that subject. Apparently, the kids are so competitive (at the good schools) in Pakistan the situation resembles the competitive nature of sport that we promote in our society whilst dumbing down and creating an "inclusive" environment for our children to study in. The Taiwanese family - the mother was an English teacher, and the husband a Maths teacher - were so sure their children would be left behind at mathematics during their year here as the material had been covered two years earlier in Taiwan, they administered their own homework in maths and science. The Russian family say that they're kids get next to no homework compared to what is normal in Russia (and Israel as they lived there for some time). I have not come across a single family which says that they're kids have struggled to keep up in comparable subjects (clearly, English or history don't fall into this category whilst maths/sciences do). In the department of both mathematics and economics where I have affiliations, foreign students and young foreign staff, are excelling, almost invariably, they seem to have covered more material at school or during their degrees. It is simply a given that UK academia as well as perhaps the City of London are the only truly international labour markets in Europe. Recently, I visited the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and I had an enlightening conversation with a Japanese student who was studying for his PhD. He said that whilst there were some brilliant local (US) undergrad students, the majority were sub par, and had clearly not put in the necessary hours of work to be good mathematicians either before arriving or subsequently. I mention this because I have heard that the US has similar issues to the UK in terms of poor levels of attainment in maths and sciences. Whilst we might wish to point to our success economically (at least until last year) and highlight the creativity and success of Silicon Valley, Wall street and the City, the truth is that many of best brains are imported into the labour markets. I must say I am concerned about the slack education system that we appear to have. The only complement I have come across is that we put more emphasis creativity, and provide children with more opportunities to express their own opinion. Whilst this is to be treasured, it should not come at the expense of rigor and hard work in subjects which require this approach - especially when we rightly impose a level playing field in labour markets. I am concerned that my son will finish school with an educational handicap in relation to his international peers. If we are to really embrace globalization, we need to do so by giving our children equal opportunities not within our nation but vis a vis other nations. We need to encourage and provide channels of education through which our children can excel particularly in subjects that transcend national boundaries.