Student Rep Meeting: 9/11/22
Year 1 Reps:
- General feeling of difficulty of courses (particularly logic), students are also then finding the labs unhelpful and the most recent InfPals session didn’t help to alleviate their concerns.
Bjorn F: advised for students to bring this to the attention of the course organiser, although courses are designed to be challenging this will be helpful for them to know, and if they would then like to perhaps give students more of a pre-context of the difficulty of each assignment.
Year 2 Reps:
- Amount of coursework ongoing at the same time feels overwhelming.
BF: advised that there is an overall project on assessment going on within the School, as in when what type of assessment and when would be most beneficial/effective for students. More discussion between the school and students on where the current stress points are will be helpful, to find a balance between coursework and ‘cramming’ at the end of the semester for exams.
- Clearer exam guidance, i.e. what is allowed to come into the exam hall, as most students haven’t been through this process for a while. Some discussion already on Piazza but an email and LEARN announcement would be beneficial.
BF: to action – speak with course organisers to ensure an email/learn announcement is sent out to cover this soon.
CD: SST are also working on general exam advice sessions for students, non-academic advice sessions on how to prepare and manage returning back to exam hall conditions – more information shortly.
Year 3 Reps:
- Students feeling stressed at Machine Learning course in particular; the content, lack of past papers and practice, the math content and have already brought this to the CA’s attention
- Coffee available to students in level 6 lab kitchen – would this be possible?
BF: to action – happy to discuss further with CA if they have more sample questions/past papers available.
Year 4 Reps:
- MLP coursework feels very time consuming for 10%
BF – advised that percentage doesn’t always relate to the about of time expected, it is more a balance of academic challenge and time than time precisely. Worth bringing up however as perhaps this could be rephrased, i.e. also part of the assessment project. Also part of wider discussion that achieving 70% is great and when students should stop on a piece of coursework.
- Also with MLP, they have discussed with Neil about when the assessment is released and the deadline on 25th
BF: to action – to speak with Neil and course organiser further about this.
- Students enjoying bioinformatics and course is very well organised
- Assessments in quiz style is becoming a general concern, i.e. the way questions are marked that you require all selections to be correct for a mark seems quite harsh, as in no reward for some right answers. Students have raised this on Piazza with lecturer but feels further conversation required.
BF – understands this can be frustrating, although lecturer may be trying to prevent students from guessing in multiple choice. Further conversation is in process with Sharon about quizzes generally for following academic years.
BF: to action – will liaise further with course organiser on this.
Year 5 Rep: not in attendance.