Student News - December, 2007

A group of six girls from the University have entered ‘Profitunity’ – a nationwide business competition in association with Ernst and Young, to help raise money for charity. The ‘Girls on Tour’ team describe themselves as “a fresh and innovative events management team”.

Food, toiletries, crockery and clothing usually discarded by those leaving university accommodation are normally incinerated, but this year they can be donated to charitable causes. Warwick Volunteers, STAR (the University’s refugee organisation), and People & Planet together with the university-based Oxfam are soliciting for donations on Saturday 8th December. They are to be sent to the Coventry Refugee Centre for distribution to Coventry’s refugees and to Grub N Gab and Valley House which are two charities which support some of Coventry’s homeless.

Warwick University has excelled in two recent nationwide studies based on the quality of its education. The University has recently been proven to have only a 3.6% drop-out rate for students, one of the lowest across the country. Two years ago over 100,000 students dropped out of UK universities in their first year. Meanwhile, a third of the 130,000 applicants via the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) who took part in a six-year study by Warwick University said that their parents had the biggest influence on their choice of university.

The head of Warwick Medical School’s medical education division has called for straight-from-school doctor training to be replaced by a single system of graduate entry medical schools. Professor Edward Peile believes this would attract more mature, motivated, independent learners who work harder.

Warwick University has entered a growing debate about lectures to students happening via podcast. This month Dr Steve Jones, a bio-chemist at King’s College London, has criticized universities such as Warwick for threatening the future of the standard lecture through this new means of teaching. He commented: “The traditional lecture has stood the test of time but it’s now under attack. It’s considered by some to be an ineffective way to construct understanding of a topic.”

Plans set forth by the University which would alter the way degrees are assessed – including a larger gap between possible marks for 2:1 and first classifications – have met resistance from both the student and academic community. The piloting of a new ‘17 Grade Point Marking Scale’ will be trailed this year across 11 departments, although it will not count towards the degrees of students affected. If the scheme is adopted, it would come into effect next year pending any changes.