Staff Student Liaison Committee Meeting
14th November 2017 – Minutes
Apologies:
In attendance: Dr Karan Khachatryan (Chair), Debbie Hall, Hannah Tagg, Lorna Woollcott, Caroline Attrill, Syed Ashar Javed, Girthiga Ganeshrajah, Ivan Srbulov, Albert Mathew, Deborah Sampah, Nishita Shah, Veridiana De Andrade Nogueira, Sofia Bounahai, Emily Yang, Mahdi Ghuloom, Jonny Marriott, Pavanraj Jhita, Shanil Doshi, Shimon Mehta, Niluxan Thusananth
Minutes from last meeting: no comments
PhD Matters:
SUPERVISORY BOARDS:Veridiana raised issues regarding clarification on supervisory boards, homogeneity across chars and supervisors, the boards hierarchy. There is confusion between two documents PhD students use for reference, the PG Handbook and the Milestones Document for first years. Lorna explained these have both been updated this year and should be clearer now, she confirmed that the Supervisor gives the advice, not the Chair of the Board’s, who should be impartial. Lorna said she would discuss this with the PGR Director and clarify the situation.
EC114 LABS: Sofia brought up that the EC114 labs have too many students for the GTA’s to cope with, the GTA’s struggle to answer everyone’s questions, the students aren’t getting anything out of the labs and they either need to be smaller or more GTA’s in each lab so they can spread themselves around and help more students. The UG reps supported this and confirmed there are issues with the labs and have been for a few years. Debbie and Hannah said these issues haven’t been raised before by students so we were unaware of the problems but would report them back and see if we could resolve them.
Since the meeting we have arranged for one more GTA to be in each lab session.
EC202 & EC201: Emily, as the MA Rep, felt there should be different lecturers and classes for MA Economics students, currently they have a joint lecture and one joint class as well as their own class. The MA students feel the level for these modules isn’t pitched high enough for them.
UG Matters:
EC202: Students reported problems with the lecture slides and the resources that are shared on Moodle, they felt the lecturer could put extra, more detailed notes after the lecturer on there, as currently just the visual aids are available to students. They also felt the lecturer jumped slides and covered too many chapters of the book and asked if he could slow down.
EC116: Albert asked why the lecturer has shifted from Stata to excel, the students feel this module is now too easy. There was further discussion on whether this module should be taught at second year level.
EMPLOYABILITY: Students asked if we could do labs/workshops on programmes like Matlab and Python. These are expected from employers and our students feel it would help them and make a different for the third years who are now on the job market. Karen said there were plenty of online resources for students to use, especially for Python, which would be useful for students.
We are also in the process of introducing a new course, BSc Economics with Computing, its currently going through the University approval process.
AOB:
PAST PAPERS:Students asked what the department policy was for releasing past mid-term tests to help with revision. Apparently some lecturers are happy to hand this out to students and others not so keen. Debbie said she would clarify this.
EC324: Ivan feltthis module is not interesting enough, he just had the mid-term test and felt it was a memorising exercise, you just needed to memorise the formulas and equations and it wasn’t challenging enough.
Date of next meeting: TBC