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Ever feel like you’ve been screwed over by your department?
So perhaps History of Art isn’t one of the biggest departments and the contact hours are shocking, even to the students taking the course. Oh and by the way, we laugh along with the jokes about our 4 hours of contact hours a week but we pay the same amount of money to be here and honestly if there was the chance of more teaching, I’d take it. However, that is an issue for another day. Today I’d like the chance to tell you about our module sign up which, especially for the current second years, has been almost laughable.
The sign up today left many people fuming, mainly those towards the back of the queue. And rightly so, you might say. After all, they turned up last therefore they deserve last choice. It’s the fairest way surely.
Well, not if the department tells you queuing will begin at 2pm sharp. Not a minute before! Email upon email was sent out to stress this fact – with a literal “turn up before at your peril” health warning attached. What the email didn’t say was that “well actually if you do come down, don’t worry, do queue up and hey we’ll even start the thing early for you”, which means when you actually do turn up at 2pm, you miss most of your module choices leaving you pretty disgruntled with the whole affair. Despite the valiant efforts by our course reps, module choices were cut down to just nine a term from a previously infinitely larger selection, though it still states on the website we “enjoy an extremely rich variety of modules choices and specialisations” - and I suppose you do, if you’re at the front of the sign up queue. Otherwise you enjoy an entirely random and unrelated, and perhaps for you, completely uninspiring choice of modules. Subjects that will not be helpful for any dissertation ideas you may already have or can in no conceivable way be brought together to form a research point.
The reason I am writing about this is because it seems that when you finally get into the swing of things in your second year, you realise how little control you truly have over your degree. You are trapped in a system that for some allows the opportunity to cultivate a passion for a certain topic, time period or movement (and you can replace those words with ones that relate to your course) while others, many more it seems, are left to flounder at the sidelines.
You are left wondering just what it was that made you pick this university and this course in a time when jobs are so sparse that if your passion isn’t ignited, especially for a humanities subject that really has no specific career path or job prospects, then, really, why are you here?
As times ahead are looking pretty dark for prospective university students, it seems likely that subjects such as History of Art will suffer; why would you choose to study a course that means you have to gamble your degree on whether you get into the Ancient Rome or Byzantine modules that you can’t wait to study, or end up studying “Stained Glass Windows”. Not for me, thank you.
Perhaps, as happened to many this year, modules will just be removed without any explanation, even after the “reassurance” from the department to not worry, because if you didn’t get your choice last year, you’ll almost certainly get it this year.
What I’m trying to say is module choices matter. Maybe your department has a better system, maybe it doesn’t. This just doesn’t seem to be the fairest way; we’re getting degrees, not queuing for Bieber tickets (perhaps that’s a terrible example though, as I am hoping to never find myself in that queue). Ok, rant over.
I chose this course and this university because of its reputation as one of the best History of Art departments in the country. Beginning to wonder why now... really good article, totally agree with you. The module sign up system is just plain unfair; I don't understand why they still use this system when almost all the History of Art students are crying out for it to change.
Or how about getting a marking system for the humanities that isn't just 'does the examiner like your idea'? fume fume fume
I feel the exact same way about the lack of control over my English degree.
It annoys me that the weighted mark system isn't swayed to benefit the student, meaning someone can get comparatively higher marks over a whole term, and still do worse than someone who manages to get a few extra marks on the last, more heavily weighted essay.
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