Student review [#48273] for Psychology
at The University of Auckland

I found that the overall university experience was not really worth my time and money. Respected professors were only actually lecturing for 1-2 weeks per course, with PhD graduates teaching the majority of the course. Sometimes these PhD graduates weren’t able to speak fluent English, which made the learning and teaching actually going on very questionable. In addition to this, you would submit a 3000 word essay, and receive a 15-20 words of feedback. I am certain that very little learning, improvement and education can occur when the feedback loop is so minimal, often generic.

In addition to this, many of the “lab” or “tutorial” components were actually university students completing post-graduate experiments as part of their thesis studies. For example, in my psych201 tutorial, we had to spend 2 hours looking at a screen only pressing the “X” or “Z” key a total of 1200 times, and if we did not attend this lecture, we would lose 2% of our total grade.

Overall, I question how much education and learning goes on, specifically in the Commerce and Science Faculties. I found my high school classes to go into more depth, with the teachers actually providing many one-on-one conversations to ensure learning is taking place, and this is the learnings that allowed me to pass my first 3 years of papers before any new content was covered, after which, the lectures would have half the class walk out because they couldn’t speak fluent english, with students opting to self-teach themselves.

If you are requiring students to partake in a study, they must be reimbursed for their time, especially if no learning is taking place.

If you are charging students $1000 per course, then the university can afford to pay for staff to assess all of the PHD candidates fluency in English, before they are allowed to teach.

In addition, no learning can take place when a question is asked in a foreign language, and the tutor/lecturer replies in a foreign language.