MedSci Students: Why the School of Medical Sciences' Revised Change Proposal should be Opposed.

Undergraduate MedSci students explain why the School of Medical Sciences’ Revised Change Proposal should be rejected.

This article is a modified version of a feedback submission to the Revised Change Proposal. The submission was written by Oscar Chaffey, Stuart Rich and Campbell Watson. It was signed by 60 other students enrolled in MedSci.

Medical Sciences students protest outside the Anderson Stuart building.

As undergraduate students who are enrolled in courses and degree programs offered by the School of Medical Sciences, we are deeply concerned by the Revised Change Proposal (RCP), which will cut a total of 18.5 full time equivalent staff members from Physiology and Pathology. The School of Medical Sciences claims to aspire “to ensure each student has an experience which is … academically of the highest quality”. It also declares that “a strong teaching model is underpinned by well-supported and productive academics”. Despite these aims, the RCP will be extremely destructive to the student experience and the quality of student learning. 

Frustratingly, there has been a lamentable lack of transparency and accountability to any form of student feedback – both undergraduate and postgraduate – throughout the consultation period. Student feedback from hundreds of Dentistry students to an earlier version of the proposal was given no response other than a reminder that their opinions would not be taken into account. 

Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students who gave feedback to an earlier version of the change proposal were also given no meaningful response, despite their legitimate concerns that staff members supervising their work would be made redundant. For instance, a response to a worried PhD candidate stated only that “we will not be formally responding to individual student submissions in this document”.

Undergraduate students were originally granted less than 48 hours to make feedback submissions to the RCP, hardly enough time to itemise the full range of student concerns about this proposal. Further, that we could even make submissions was exceptionally poorly advertised, despite the existence of formal channels such as mass email lists by which to contact students. In fact, a mass email was sent out to Medical Sciences students on the 2nd of October instructing them to “focus on [their] studies” in light of their concern about the Draft Change Proposal (DCP). No such mass communication has been sent out to alert students to the existence of this feedback period.

We believe that there should be an extended consultation period on the RCP, or that an updated version of the RCP be issued which takes into account staff and student feedback. We insist that a genuine effort be made to address student concerns. An example of such good-faith engagement with student feedback would be a point-by-point, direct response to each of the concerns itemised in our submission.

One of our key concerns is that making redundant the full time equivalent of 18.5 staff members in Physiology and Pathology is a threat to the student learning experience. The inevitable result of this decision will be an increased student to staff ratio. Our experiences at university inform us that the most valuable learning takes place when this ratio is as small as possible, facilitating active engagement and individual interactions rather than passive learning in large groups.

Claims that Physiology and Pathology, the disciplines which are experiencing the cuts, are overstaffed are nonsense. As students who have first-hand experienced units of studies in Physiology and Pathology throughout our time at this university, we know that staff in these disciplines are both exceptionally competent and routinely working beyond the hours for which they are paid in order to address student concerns, mark work, and prepare teaching resources. Reducing the teaching staff will inevitably strain the remaining staff members’ ability to interact with us, answer our questions, and prepare quality learning resources, to our direct academic detriment.

Some students will commence Honours in 2021 and aspire to complete higher degrees by research. The staff members whose positions are to be made redundant by the RCP comprise many of our potential supervisors. This proposal has cast significant uncertainty on our future plans and we believe the best way to remedy this would be to desist from cutting staff members. SOMS’ pre-existing contingency plans in the event that research supervisors are unable to run projects due to leave or sickness will not lessen in any way the impact of this supervisor shortage on students. The annual, normally expected phenomenon of a small number of supervisors being unavailable due to personal or academic circumstances is in no way comparable to the extraordinary phenomenon of dozens of supervisors being made redundant at once.

We believe that the University’s ranking of 23rd in the QS World Rankings for Life Science and Medicine would be threatened by an increase in the staff-to-student ratio and the inevitable downturn in research produced as a result of these proposed changes. Similarly, sacking a large number of the academics who teach this program would be detrimental not only to Sydney Medical School’s current ranking as second in Australia and eighteenth globally for Medicine, but also the program’s continued accreditation.

The student data adduced in Appendix 4 to the RCP as partial justification for the proposed changes are not only unreliable but irrelevant. These data, from a small sample size, refer to students at universities around Australia enrolled in the very broad area of “mathematics and science”. This student feedback is specific neither to Medical Sciences students nor even to students enrolled at the University of Sydney, and is consequently irrelevant to, and absolutely cannot be used as justification for, the changes proposed in the DCP and RCP.

Although this is by far not an exhaustive list of problems with the proposed changes to the School of Medical Sciences, these are our principal concerns. We are deeply worried for our education and the students who will come after us. We are also in solidarity with the brilliant and devoted staff members in Physiology, Pathology, and all other Medical Sciences disciplines, who have guided us in our education thus far, and who all deserve the firm support of their students, colleagues, and management to continue their essential teaching and research activities unimpeded.