UNITED KINGDOM
OXFORD STUDENTS OUTRAGED BY SPOTIFY BAN
Students at the University of Oxford expressed shock last week at the prestigious institution’s decision to ban the popular music-sharing program Spotify. According to the university newspaper Cherwell, students were “baffled” when Spotify suddenly stopped working, with no explanation, last week. The newspaper quoted a second-year student as saying it was, “a discrimination against music lovers”. The university’s computer services, the OUCS banned the program as “… the use of peer-to-peer resource sharing software on machines connected to the Oxford University Network is prohibited”. The OUCS claims that the problem with allowing peer-to-peer software is that it requires an enormous bandwidth. It elaborated, “Bandwidth that seems insignificant for one user will soon add up when scaled up to many thousands of users connected to Oxford University’s networks. It is one thing attempting to justify a network upgrade on the basis of a genuine academic requirement, such as the petrabytes of data expected from CERN when their latest collider comes online.”
STUDENT ATTENTION SPAN AVERAGES A WHOLE TEN MINUTES
According to new research carried out in a survey for the technology firm Olympus, students at universities across the UK have an average attention span of just ten minutes. In a survey of 1,000 students, the average length of time a student could concentrate for in lectures was ten minutes, many blaming a lack of sleep and being overworked. Among the students surveyed, 13% admitted to missing up to five hours of lectures a week, while 17% said they had to prioritise their part-time jobs over lectures in order to support themselves. The survey suggested that when it came to student life, the majority of students are ill-prepared both for learning and for living an independent life, with money and lectures being the biggest hurdles. Meanwhile one in ten said they feared their university degree would be a waste of money, with almost a quarter believing they will not stand out to supporters once they graduate. National Union of Students president Wes Streeting said, “Given that students are graduating with record levels of debt, and job prospects are at an all-time low, it is no surprise that so many are having to take on part-time work which is adversely affecting their studies.”
UNIVERSITIES AWARD RECORD NUMBER OF FIRSTS
Official figures show that last year a record 43,000 firsts were awarded by institutions in the UK, almost double the number of a decade ago. Published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, figures also showed that almost two-thirds of graduates gained at least a 2:1 in 2009 as results increased for the fifth straight year. The figures come amid plans for a drastic overhaul of traditional degree classifications as UK universities are currently trialling a graduate “report card” which is intended to represent a more accurate picture of students’ achievements, after saying the existing 200-year-old system had “outgrown its usefulness”.
FRANCE
STUDENT GOES ON STABBING SPREE IN SLEEPY FRENCH TOWN
A Chinese student stabbed to death a 49-year-old secretary and wounded three other people in an attack at a university in France officials said last week. The 26-year-old sociology student killed the woman with a butcher’s knife and wounded three other people, one of them seriously. Police arrested the student from the northeastern city of Shenyang, “who appeared to be suffering from an attack of dementia” said public prosecutor Jean Pierre Dreno. President Nicolas Sarkozy offered condolences to the victim’s family and praised the courage of bystanders who came to her aid and managed to subdue the attacker. In a statement issued by his office, he expressed “support for the whole university community and hopes that investigations will shed light on these events as soon as possible”.
