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posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 22 2017, @06:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up dept.

An Oxford graduate's failure to get a top degree cost him a lucrative legal career, the High Court has heard.

Faiz Siddiqui alleges "inadequate" teaching on his modern history course resulted in him getting a low upper second degree in June 2000. He blames staff being absent on sabbatical leave and is suing the university for £1m. Oxford denies negligence and causation and says the case is "massively" outside the legal time limit.He said: "Whilst a 2:1 degree from Oxford might rightly seem like a tremendous achievement to most, it fell significantly short of Mr Siddiqui's expectations and was, to him, a huge disappointment."

Mr Mallalieu said his employment history in legal and tax roles was "frankly poor" and he was now unemployed, rather than having a career at the tax bar in England or a major US law firm. Mr Siddiqui also said his clinical depression and insomnia have been significantly exacerbated by his "inexplicable failure". Julian Milford, for Oxford University, told the court Mr Siddiqui complained about insufficient resources, but had only described the teaching as "a little bit dull".

Perhaps he might find employment with "This is Windows calling..."


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:15AM (4 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:15AM (#600580) Journal
    The Oxbridge system is a little bit weird, in that teaching is split between centralised departments and federated colleges. The departments provide lectures, the colleges provide small group teaching ('supervisions'), typically one per 3 hours of lectures in groups of 2-3. He is alleging that his college failed to provide this, which means that he didn't get an important part of the teaching required for a degree. I don't know if this is true (and, if it is, I don't know if he'd be able to prove it after 17 years), but if it's true then he might possibly have a case, because the supervision system is a big part of how Oxbridge advertises its degrees.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday November 23 2017, @04:45PM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday November 23 2017, @04:45PM (#600708) Homepage
    After the first year, half of my pure maths tutorials, and all of my applied maths tutorials, were 1-on-1. Then again, I went to a small college (3 mathematicians in my year), and I was the only one taking some of the courses. Talking to others in other colleges, 1-on-1 wasn't that unusual. Things may have become "cheaper" over time, but this guy was a couple of decades back too.
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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:14PM (2 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:14PM (#600744) Journal
      One-on-one is less common now, because some research done by Oxford has shown that groups of three are best for supervisions in most subjects (maths may be an exception). It's easy in one-on-one supervisions for the supervisor to do all the talking and in groups of two it's fairly common for one student to dominate to the detriment of the other. Groups of three are less stable and so tend to promote more discussion between the students (and as a supervisor, the ideal thing for supervisions is when one of the students is explaining something to the others, because explaining something that you've just learned is the best way of cementing that knowledge).
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      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:23PM (#600870) Journal

        some research done by Oxford has shown that groups of three are best for supervisions in most subjects

        I'd be interested in this "research." Did they look at higher numbers of students? ...because "best" seems hard to define here, depending on your goals. I'm very familiar with the Oxbridge system, even though I never went there. And I knew the ideal there is often thought to be 1-3. But over the years I've done independent studies one-on-one with profs, and I've been in or taught classes with 3 students and up, with a lot of classes with between 3 and 8 students or so.

        My personal experience as a student and then as an instructor is that the ideal number depends greatly on the number of students, but if I really want good discussion, 4-6 is actually my ideal number. Three or fewer can work, but it's still quite likely with 2 or 3 students to end up with a situation where the instructor is doing most of the talking. Just by the odds, by the time you get to 5 students or so, you're much more likely to get at least one "talker" in your group, who will spur on discussion and participation with the others. Two or three can get very awkward -- much more so than one-on-one -- unless the personalities mesh well and the supervisor can figure out how to make the dynamic work well consistently. Obviously, though, the more students you add in, the harder it becomes to ensure all are on-task and learning everything. But it's still generally pretty hard to "hide" in a group of 5 or so.

        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 24 2017, @11:05AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Friday November 24 2017, @11:05AM (#601013) Journal
          It's been five years since I looked at the study, but I seem to recall that they looked at groups of 5-6. They also, as I recall, differentiated between supervision-style and seminar-style teaching, where the latter often wants larger groups. The problem with larger groups is that you end up needing a more fixed curriculum, whereas a supervision-style arrangement lets you wander off from the syllabus and teach things of greater interest to the students if you have a group that's already confident with the lecture material. The other problem with larger groups is that a dominant individual ends up monopolising the supervision (I saw this in my own undergraduate degree at a non-Oxbridge university where our weekly tutorials ended up being one-on-one lessons for me with a professor, with five spectators hoping that no one asked them a question). With a smaller group, it's much easier for the supervisor to steer the conversation towards the quieter students.
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