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The purpose of WillISeeMyTutor is to allow prospective students to measure and compare any university in the UK by their staff-student ratio, thereby giving an objective measure of:
1. How well the universities are performing.
2. The likely quality of education you will receive.
We believe that the lower the student-staff ratio (SSR) the better the education a student will receive, and the better they will be able to flourish academically and achieve their full potential. This is because the key resource a university has is its academic staff, not simply the buildings, the campus or the institutions name.
If an institution offers only high ratios, then our broad theme of accessing and engaging in dialogue with academic and teaching staff will become that much more difficult and the overall quality of the education will suffer.
Most students are not aware of SSR's and only belatedly discover it after they enroll and actually go to university (i.e. when it's too late). Few universities publish their SSR's (maybe they have something to hide) so we are doing it for them! In fact, we believe that we are the first website to do this anywhere in the world!
What Good SSR's Typically Mean:
1. Smaller seminar groups:
a. Where you can talk and discuss ideas with confidence (not everyone can or wants to do this in a larger group).
b. There is time for you to get your thoughts and ideas across without having to compete with lots of others.
c. You can develop your ideas and thoughts on a subject to a fuller and often more sophisticated way, in part through responding to and challenging others, and discussing issues at length and depth.
d. You can frequently come away feeling that you have both contributed something and developed your own thinking as well.
e. You can engage with your tutor, especially if there is something you disagree with or have been struggling to understand, and they can respond to you (sometimes more helpful than reading their book).
2. More tutorial opportunities
a. More tutor availability.
b. More time in tutorials for individual students and more support given.
c. More personal attention, encouragement and personal development.
What Bad SSR's Typically Mean:
3. Seminar Groups that resemble classes:
a. So called 'seminar groups' that are basically classes by another name (i.e. 20 plus students can be usual).
b. No real chance to discuss issues meaningfully or beyond a superficial manner (if there is 25 students in a 'seminar' each would have little more than 2 minutes each to speak [assuming convention that 1 person speaks at a time].
c. Large seminar groups discourage speaking as you generally have to be more confident of what you are saying (it's harder to take risks with ideas and thoughts) something which acts as an injunction against learning.
d. In consequence, little is expected of you and in turn you gain very little.
4. Tutorial opportunities
a. There are fewer staff to see and it's harder to see them, especially when demand is high (usually when assignments are due).
b. The support that staff can give is adversely affected; less time can be given and there is less availability.
What WillISeeMyTutor does not mean:
We mean the overall capacity the institutions staffing resources has to meet student demand and furnish academic flourishing rather than a focus on any single individual's subjective experience (although hearing about these are important to us, as we hope to incorporate qualitative analysis of these experiences into a later version of WillISeeMyTutor).