On the face of it, you'd be hard put to find a connection between academic performance, Dublin traffic and public transport - but there is.
In a lifestyle survey conducted among the 1998-99 crop of first-year chemistry students at UCD, the traffic, along with bus and train services, emerged as the major cause of poor attendance at 9 a.m. lectures. And, UCD academics have discovered that, for the majority of students, there is a direct link between poor lecture attendance and exam performance.
Two-thirds of the students surveyed said they use public transport to get to college. Forty per cent of these cited Dublin traffic as the main reason they failed to get to UCD in time for 9 a.m. lectures. "We have students getting buses from Tallaght, Clondalkin, Malahide and Portmarnock at 6.50 a.m.," says Dr Declan Gilheany, chairperson of UCD's first science chemistry committee, who conducted the survey. "If there is the slightest disruption, they don't make it for 9 a.m. lectures. They get in about 9.15 a.m. or 9.20 a.m., but tend not to come to lectures if they're going to be late."
Alarm bells began to ring in UCD's chemistry department last year, when first-year failure rates jumped up to 14 per cent. Before that they had hovered at just under 10 per cent. At the same time, staff noted a drop-off in lecture attendance.
"We felt the fact that our lectures are at 9 a.m. had some bearing on this," Gilheany says. "There was a lot of anecdotal evidence that students were beginning to feel less pressured to get good results than they were in the 1980s, because of the Celtic Tiger. "Some people argued that the removal of fees meant that students were beginning to place a lower value on education and that they were spending too much time working in paid jobs. We decided to monitor the situation.
"We were getting only a 60 to 65 per cent attendance on Mondays. This would rise to 70 per cent on Wednesdays, but by Friday we were lucky to reach 50 per cent," Gilheany adds. "We monitored lecture attendance on five occasions, tutorial attendance on 10 occasions and 10 homeworks and we plotted a graph of the exam results obtained in chemistry. "With one exception, there was a direct correlation between poor exam results and poor lecture attendance. People who attended everything got an average mark of 60, which is good." The chemistry department opted for the daily 9 a.m. lecture slot a quarter of a century ago, Gilheany notes. "It's the best time for learning. We considered moving the lectures to 9.15 am but that would have a knock-on effect throughout the day."
UCD scientists also considered drawing lots for the 9 a.m. slots and taking turns. However, academics feared that this might encourage students to skip all 9 a.m. lectures. Instead, UCD chemists have decided to record lecture attendance. This, they hope will highlight its importance. The lifestyle survey, which was conducted last March among first-year chemistry students (and got a 90 per cent response), shows that while 60 per cent of the students lived at home, only one-fifth of those lived near the campus.
Some 10 per cent of students who reported living away from home also lived at some distance from the campus.
ONE-THIRD of students rated their financial situations as "tight", "difficult" or "desperate", while one quarter were "comfortable" and 41 per cent "managing".
The lifestyle survey shows that more than half of the students were engaged in paid work during term time - with just over one quarter working more than 10 hours per week. This concerns Gilheany, he says.
"If you're working more than 10 hours per week, you are putting yourself under pressure. Students are supposed to be full time and, to do well, you need to put in a 40-hour week. If you want to get a first or a 2:1, you have to work that bit harder - including over the weekends," he says.
Although one-quarter of the students surveyed said paid work during term time was essential to their remaining in college, 18 per cent said it was irrelevant. These are likely to be those students who work during term time to earn cash for an enhanced social life and to finance designer clothes. Two-thirds of students, however, said paid work at night played no part in their failure to get to 9 a.m. lectures. Dublin traffic and public transport apart, Government cutbacks in the 1980s have also impacted on academic performance, Gilheany suggests.
"When we were engaged in our quality assurance procedure, it became apparent that students found first-year practicals old-fashioned and not very exciting." Back in 1987, he notes, State funds to replace capital equipment dried up. "As our glassware equipment (used in experiments) got broken, we were unable to replace it. By 1992, we had no glassware for preparative chemistry. We had to rejig our experiments. We took physical chemistry out of second year and into first year.
"This uses machines for experiments and, while they are good, they are not very exciting. Nothing much happens and they're a bit advanced for first-years - 40 per cent of students said they didn't really understand what they were doing. The students found it dull." Preparatory chemistry is now done in second year. The £250 million Education and Technology Investment Fund has changed all that. Launched in 1997, the fund includes £10 million for the upgrading and replacing of science equipment in the universities. As a result, UCD has been able to replace its glassware.
"We did a survey of our equipment and found that most of it was over 20 years old," Gilheany explains. "This summer, we were given £220,000 to replace it. Because of this injection of capital we can return to the pre-1992 position and put preparatory chemistry into first year," Gilheany says.
"The money will have a revolutionary effect on this department. We will be able to do things we haven't been able to do for ten years. We'll be able to buy modern machinery for analysis. We can now run courses we haven't been able to offer before."
