Up-end attendance rules for tutorials and lectures

DEBATE rages about whether class sizes are too large at universities.

DEBATE rages about whether class sizes are too large at universities. All I have to go by is my own experience, as a student and an academic. And you bet they are, but simply complaining about it is unlikely to yield change. Governments have little by way of extra funding to improve the situation and vice-chancellors, when they do find extra money, are likelier to funnel it into research (the decider of quality within the system).

When I started tertiary study nearly two decades ago, tutorials could be held in the offices of the academics. Nothing could have been more intellectually stimulating to a callow young mind than the chance to sit in an ivory tower office with one's peers and an authority figure holding a PhD. We were forced to participate courtesy of the fact, with no more than eight people in the room, there was nowhere to hide.

One result of smaller class sizes was that if you didn't do your readings you didn't bother turning up. With tutorials compulsory, that meant dropping out.

By the time I started tutoring, roughly a decade ago, to get a tute group in an office would break more than a couple of occupational health and safety standards. Tutorials had blown out to 20 students and in more recent times I have presided over classes of 25 to 30 students. That was the administrative requirement for class sizes at my previous university.

Larger tutorials mean students can hide. They are less likely to do their reading and in turn bring down the tone of an already overcrowded discussion.

Because the classes are compulsory, they always turn up, offering little of value to the discussion when they do.

What to do about this situation? As already noted, it's unlikely to change. Adapting is the answer. I can speak only to traditional lecture and tutorial classes in the humanities, but the tried and tested approach has been two hours of lectures (which are not compulsory) and one hour of tutorials each week (which are).

Given the exploding numbers in tutorials, university guidelines should be changed so that lectures become compulsory -- and rollcalls should therefore be taken -- and tutorials become optional (albeit encouraged, of course).

If that were to happen lectures would be better attended overnight. At the moment most academics will tell you they are lucky if half their class turn up. Yet lectures are the bread and butter of units, especially if readings aren't being done by students working longer and longer casual hours of employment to support themselves. Making lectures compulsory would give all students a rudimentary understanding of the units they take, which isn't happening at the moment for those who skip lectures.

However, it is the consequence of removing the compulsory requirement of tutorials that would solve overcrowding. If they were optional, and assuming what happens now in lectures repeated itself in tutorials instead, class sizes of 25 to 30 would instantly become manageable were they to drop to 12 to 15.

You might not be able to cram the group into an office but academics sure would be able to deliver a better product to those who turned up.

A simple procedural change such as this would give diligent students better services. Those who presently are skating through, missing lectures and attending tutes they don't understand, would get the benefit of lectures that outline the basics of the unit, missing the detailed tute discussions needed to get higher grades.

And, most important to university administrators, academics would have less reason to bitch about class sizes. All without needing to inject more money into the system.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor and the foundation chair of journalism at the University of Western Australia.