External examiners evaluating students graduating from one the country’s most popular academic programmes have expressed their concern about the quality of its teaching.
The year 402 new students began in studying “human centred informatics”, the study of the use and design of IT and how people interact with it, but in a letter to Politiken newspaper, the external examiners say the graduating students they have reviewed have not been adequately prepared in the field.
Over the past three months, of the 25 students submitting their thesis for evaluation, five received the grade ‘00’, the second-lowest possible mark.
Dean: most students pass
“This is a sign that there’s something wrong with the programme itself,” said Jørgen Søndergaard, a Higher-Education Ministry official.
Examiners say they have expressed concern for a number of years that students were not learning basic information about the subject.
Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, the programme’s dean, told Politiken that most of the programme’s graduating students had submitted passing theses prior to September, and that it was impossible to apply the recent high failure rate to the programme as a whole.
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