--- ATTENTION - UNI. OF MANCHESTER FINAL YEAR ECONOMICS STUDENTS --- Dear third years students, As you know the current push in our campaign is to get ‘Bubbles, Panics and Crashes: An alternative look at Economic Crises’ accepted as a ‘for-credit’ module next year. To ensure that campaign works effectively, we would like to ask all third year students to hold fire on filling in their NSS if they haven’t done so already. The NSS is a powerful tool. It is the most effective way to feedback to the university, and is something that they value very highly as I am sure you are aware. It is something we should wield with care, and must not be filled in lightly or without considerable thought. We should use this opportunity to ensure that we are honest with our critique of courses so that the university can consistently improve. Some of us have been told in lectures that giving the university a bad NSS result will ‘cheapen’ your degree and make it worthless. This is fundamentally untrue. NSS is designed to point out to the university where its failings in undergraduate teaching lie. This enables them to see where the problems are, and where strategies can be out in place to overcome these problems and improve student experience. If they don’t know where problems occur then they won’t be able to fix them. If they don’t fix the problems we see then they will never improve. Filling in your NSS honestly will ensure that the university can identify and overcome its failings. Once it has overcome its failings its student experience ranking will climb continuously, and the university as a whole will move up the university ranking tables. In the long run this will make your degree worth more, not less as some people have implied. Because of this, we are asking you to please wait before filling out your NSS until after the university has made its decision regarding Bubbles, Panics and Crashes. If it decides to accept this course as a module it will be demonstrating its dedication to its students and its ability to listen, recognise its failures and respond to the world around it. It will have begun its journey towards an economics education that works for us and for wider society. If it rejects this module the opposite will be true. We believe that the result of this decision should have a bearing on how we rate the university in the NSS. We hope you agree. Many thanks, Post-Crash Economics Society
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:31:21 +0000