Increasing checks on lecturers

– It is like a bee to honey if the lecturers themselves are in control of the evaluations of their own lectures. It is often the best lecturers who make the best plans for evaluation, says Ronny Sødahl Furunes, member of the Student Committee of The Norwegian Association of Law Graduates.

He himself has studied law at the University of Oslo (UiO), and the problems concerning unprepared lecturers with insufficient pedagogical training were brought up with the faculty administration when he was a member of the Student Council half a year ago.

The quality control regulations are stricter for research than for teaching, and this affects the students, according to Furunes. The Norwegian Association of Law Graduates sent a letter to the faculty in the spring, in which they suggested «regular external controls on teaching».

Furunes also suggests to Universitas that there should be video monitoring of the teaching. With videos and external observers doing random samples would be able to measure the quality more accurately and could then report to the faculty administration.

– They have carried this out at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and this will not just make it easier to evaluate the lecturers. Publishing the videos on the internet will also make it easier for students to revise the material, says Furunes.

– The responsibility of the faculty

– Currently, the teaching is variable, concedes leader of the Law Students’ Council, Ane Hege Nøstestad.

It is up to the faculty administration to deal with the insufficient appraisals, she states.

– The faculty should co-operate with the Student Council in order to find solutions. The most important thing is that the feedback is dealt with and that it does not just stop with the lecturer, she says.

Finn Arnesen, Vice Dean at the Faculty of Law, confirms that he has registered dissatisfaction among students. The faculty recently chose to remove the names of teachers during course registration, because certain lecturers were more popular than others. – We chose to remove the names of the teachers because the choices the students were making were based on rumours, and were ill-founded, Arnesen states.

He adds that they have both external and internal teaching staff and that by removing names from the courses they were taking into consideration that internal teaching staff have a teaching quota to fill.

– Does this mean that the external lecturers were more popular?

– There is no doubt that in some cases the external lecturers have proved to be the most popular. Since the teachers are presenting the same material, I wanted the students to make a choice based on times, rather than on rumours concerning who is good and who is not, says Arnesen.

Do not want entertainment

The Dean is negative to the idea of filming lecturers. He believes that this may lead to the entertainment aspect of lectures becoming more important than the academic content.

– Sometimes the ability to entertain is confused with the ability to teach. This is also a question of funding. This kind of appraisal must be used for something, says Arnesen.

He thinks that one would not be able to offer any coursing to lecturers who are having difficulties with their presentation, and he therefore questions whether checking systems through external appraisals would be a sensible use of resources. In addition to this, he points out that externals observers would need academic insight.

– An external person would probably be able to evaluate some general pedagogical aspects. But if we were to hire a business lawyer, then that would of course demand a lot of resources.