The week in higher education – 13 April 2023

Answering even one University Challenge question successfully from the comfort of the sofa is seen by many to be a sure sign of genius. The BBC quiz show that pits UK universities against one another is famously tricky, and the corporation has recently been accused of making it even more difficult, according to The Guardian. Frank Coffield, a Durham-based emeritus professor of education at UCL, believes that by allowing separate Oxford and Cambridge colleges to enter, while limiting other universities to one each, the TV programme most recently hosted by Jeremy Paxman is rigged. Oxbridge colleges have won the competition 27 times in the previous 51 series, which Professor Coffield argues is no surprise given that they have an unfair advantage. He claims that the rejection of a Freedom of Information request to reveal exactly how many teams from Oxbridge have appeared on the show proves that the BBC is “hiding” the extent of its bias.

Once upon a time, a student who created a viral video of their professor from the back of a lecture theatre would have been reprimanded, not applauded. However, in an influencer marketing course – taught by a public relations executive from Taco Bell – things appear to be a little bit different. As reported in The New York Times, Matthew Prince told his students at Chapman University in southern California that if anyone in the class could create a TikTok video that received a million views before he did, the final exam would be cancelled. Sylvie Bastardo’s idea – to upload a six-second plea for views alongside a catchy audio clip – was a simple one, but it achieved the desired goal in just one day. “I was just trying to think of new ways to help support some of the teaching that I’m trying to get across over the course of the semester,” said Mr Prince.

The Chinese state has offered various incentives to help raise its ailing birth rate over recent years, including tax deductions, longer maternity leave and housing subsidies. Now higher education seems to be getting in on the act as well, according to the New York Post, with two colleges encouraging their students to take extra time off over the spring break to “enjoy love”. In extending a traditional one-day holiday to a week off, Sichuan Southwest Vocational College of Civil Aviation told students to “leave the classroom, leave campus, enjoy…nature and feel the beauty of spring and love”. Xiamen University also gave its students extra time off in what many onlookers suspected was an attempt to help solve the long tail of the country’s famed one-child policy of 1980 to 2015. “I’m sure this is just another attempt to push people into having more babies,” one person was reported to have commented on the social media site Weibo.

The pale, squidgy-looking creature with fins captured by a deep-sea camera this month might just look like cute marine life, but the snailfish photographed at the bottom of the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, south of Japan, represents a major scientific breakthrough. Captured at 27,349 feet below the surface – just 2,000 feet less than Mount Everest is tall – it is thought to be the deepest observation of sea life ever made. Scientists from the Minderoo-University of Western Australia Deep Sea Research Centre and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology explored three trenches as part of a decade-long study into the deepest fish populations in the world. Alan Jamieson, founder of the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre and chief scientist on the expedition, seemed unsurprised. “We predicted the deepest fish would be there, and we predicted it would be a snailfish,” he said. He told the BBC: “If this record is broken, it would only be by minute increments, potentially by just a few metres.”

Problem-based learning has swung in and out of fashion, but necessity remains the mother of invention, as demonstrated recently by a student at York St John University in the UK, who tasked ChatGPT with getting her out of a parking ticket. Millie Houlton prompted the AI writer software to craft a letter to York City Council appealing against a £60 parking fine, which she said was imposed despite her having a permit. It turned out a “perfectly formed personalised response”, she told the BBC. “It said I was a student and that I had paid for my permit for two years, and I wasn’t going to deliberately park somewhere I shouldn’t.” The outcome was a relief for the events and business management student, who said she would otherwise have paid rather than deal with the faff of appealing so close to final exams. A problem solved, leaving more time for learning.