Dear all,

Another email to ensure that I never win a "Mr Popular" contest.

General levels of student involvement in trying to improve the quality of the degree is disappointing. Some students do a lot, many do nothing.

Having got all the feedback forms back to look at, there are 9 of our courses with no feedback forms at all and the rest have an ever decreasing % of feedback returns.

There has also been a very vigourous debate recently about teaching issues, some of it very useful, some of it less, but nearly all of it was members of staff.

The top 20 people who know our degree system include:

Me - I designed the whole bloody thing and try to ensure that it works as a coherent whole

Tuomo - he gets to teach a stupidly large proportion of it

Jari - he gets the nearly impossible task to try to turn the theoretically "perfect"  timetable into a practical one with no timetable clashes despite the best efforts of staff and other departments to mess it up.

17 students.

The next 20 will also all be students.

You are the only people who have been in every course. You are the people who know the degree the best. You may not have all of the information on the big picture, on why we make compromises where we have to, but still you know best of all how it is on the ground.

We need to do an evaluation of the whole degree now that the phase in of the BSc has finished and the MSc starts. We need to make it the best we can within the limitations we have. We need your input into this.

Tuomo, Jari and I work damn hard to try to get it to work, to provide a system in which it is possible for one 3rd year student to be doing their 3rd summer placement in a real research group and another to be doing their 2nd, this time in a research group in another country.  It is a tough degree but remember our students in the old system were highly regarded and I believe that we prepare our students far better in the new system. That requires effort from you as well as from us.

There has been some good feedback from students and those I would like to thank, but there has been too little of it.

I believe that we have got 90% of the new system right 1st time (within the compromises we had to make) and where we got it wrong (e.g. 2nd year timetabling last year) we corrected it as quickly as possible.

I am very biased though (and also loud mouthed, opinionated and demanding - in short I'm British) and we need feedback from the people who have been through it.

How does it work out in practice? Is it coherent? Is it developmental? Do we give the right skills at the right time? What skills should we teach that we don't already? What should we consider dropping? What is good and what is bad? How does our teaching compare with that from other departments? Is there anything we can learn from them? Is the timetabling working? Does keeping the 3rd year open to allow choice of courses from other departments work? Etc etc.

There are changes next year - Biomolecules becomes more compact and finally gets to split the practical classes in two groups as we finally have enough demonstrators, there may be a new "teaching for biochemists" course, we have 6 new MSc level courses coming on line including integration into a research group and many more smaller changes as well.

There has been some excellent feedback from students, but there needs to be much more both from current students and ex-students (once you see other places or the "real world of work" feed back ideas on what we did right or what needs to be made better).

Please take the time to think about this and either drop in to see me (I don't bite - at least not often) or send an email.

Remember though to be constructive not destructive in your critisism i.e. try to make suggestions for improvements rather than just saying "this is bad" (polite version). Also please remember to say what works, what is good, if we only focus on the bad we can lose sight of what is good and may end up losing that in any changes we make.

If you send to histoni (and cc to me) I will take your feedback as public. If you email to me or see me in person I will treat it as confidential. Please be honest (remember good things as well as bad things though). Do not be afraid of voicing your opinions, honesty I rate very highly, apathy though is a terrible thing.

We give you more of chance to influence your degree than many other departments. As with so many things in life it is use it or lose it.

Have a good summer everyone.

Lloyd