"They cut and paste essays from the web. Reading books is a skill which has been lost."
"Elementary maths is missing. They can't put decent sentences together."
So that's what university lecturers and admissions tutors think about their first year students. Asked about the future of the 14 to 19 school curriculum, focus groups of tutors complained loudly about students' need for spoon-feeding, lack of essay writing skills and basic algebra, as we report today.
Read the story here
Of course one person's spoon-feeding is another's teaching - the Nuffield 14-19 review undertaken by Oxford's department of educational studies wasn't asking students what they thought about the teaching - or lack of it - they encountered when they reached university. Are they depressed by uninspiring lectures, lack of personal contact, failure to mark their essays on time? Do tell us.
But the report (pdf) is by no means just a nostalgic moan - it raises serious questions about the current state of A-levels and vocational qualifications.
What the focus groups, incorporating 250 tutors from 16 institutions - including Oxford, Cambridge and ten other old universities - teased out was not that they conidered A-levels were getting too easy but that students were being over-examined and suffering "assessment burn-out".
Increasingly students were taking the view that "if it's not asessed it doesn't matter".
Tutors blamed the emphasis on modules for narrowing students' vision and meaning they didn't make the connections between different parts of a subject.
What do they want? (Ucas hopefuls and their teachers please take note.)
The Nuffield report says: "What HE tutors are looking for in their new students is quite simple to state (but difficult to achieve in practice): students who are committed to studying a subject, engaging critically with ideas, prepared to take some intellectual risks and able to use a range of skills to develop arguments.
"This 'wish' list should not be construed as a rather whimsical harking back to some previous golden age. The view expressed again and again was that higher education should foster the development of such skills, but that the current arrangements for 14-19 learning increasingly meant they had to do this ab initio, i.e. the current qualification structures and assessment arrangements (combined with narrow accountability measures) were counter-productive to developing these desirable attributes."
The report also makes the point that universities have the power to undemine any reforms of the 14 to 19 curriculum such as key skills and the Scoittish over-arching award.
