Declining standards should not be ignored

Failure rates have risen in other commerce areas in recent years. For example, in two large second-year accounting courses in 2004, with more than 800 and over 700 students in them, the failure rates rose to 36 per cent and 28 per cent, along with conceded pass rates of 15 per cent and 14 per cent respectively.

Conscious that the failure rates in my second year course were rising and substantially exceeded the university guidelines that failure rates be below 20 per cent unless there are exceptional circumstances, I ran in 1999 a survey on student work hours. More than 40 per cent of the students worked less than five hours a week on the course compared with the then university guidelines that students were expected to work 12hours a week on a standard course. A follow-up faculty-wide survey a year later came up with similar results.

There is some evidence from the national survey of economics departments that I ran for the Economic Society of Australia in 2003-04 that the decline in student participation is a national phenomenon and that it is a significant factor in other departments where standards are perceived to have fallen.

As part of a general quality-raising program, I proposed some three years ago that the commerce faculty at Macquarie University draw up a memorandum of understanding outlining faculty and student responsibilities. This would be signed annually by both parties and ensure that students are fully aware of the expectations on them. No effective action has occurred to date.

In 2002, I ran two vocabulary tests containing 36 simple questions set by a lecturer in the department of linguistics.

Among these students, drawn from all backgrounds, 37 per cent failed 10 or more questions, which the linguistics lecturer judged would make the students likely to fail economics courses on grounds of poor vocabulary alone.

As another prong in the proposed quality-raising program, I have proposed that all students entering the university in any year, including new postgraduate students, do a generic skills test in week three. The university would then have an effective measure of the linguistic and general skill base of its students and could seek to deal with the observed problems in a systematic way. Again no action has been taken on this proposal.

Over the past 15 or so years the number of students at Macquarie University has risen by about 150 per cent, from about 12,000 students to more than 30,000 students. There seems little doubt that student standards have fallen at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in at least parts of the university over this period.

Doubtless the causes of any changes in student standards are complex and, equally, there are many possible responses other than those I have suggested. But there appears to have been little effective evaluation of student standards.

Denial and bluster are not constructive responses to a potentially serious issue. The starting point should be acknowledgement that there may be genuine issues of concern. There then needs to be rigorous analysis of student standards and their causes. Following this, the university needs to be willing to act on the results of such analysis.