The rest of the time is spent on research and keeping lecture material up to date. Just how long do you reckon it takes to mark a hundred or more essays, twice a semester and do exams, see students, more research and teach? Most lecturers in term time are doing 60 hour weeks. You have no idea what it is like in HE any more. Those days of working a few hours a week are long gone with targets culture, bullying management styles and having to take every useless working class student with half an A level to meet equality and diversity guidelines. Grant applications are also done throughout the year and can be quite time consuming along with lots of the other admin that is no longer handled by admin staff. There are some lazy beggars that don't deserve the money but there are some extremely talented and hard working individuals.
You also fail to understand how learning works and how cramming does nothing for long term understanding of a subject. It might be ok for school education to churn out moronic parrots but it shouldn't be transferred to Higher Education which is about actual proper learning that stays with you for life and provides a solid framework for all later knowledge to be attached.
HEFCE makes it very hard to over recruit, under recruit, fail the terminally stupid or generally actually exercise any academic independence. The 40% participation is a total utter disaster and has made degrees completely worthless. I'd tell your kids not to bother going to uni. Unless they are going to get a first from a decent uni - Oxbridge, Durham, Leicester then forget it. There's thousands of graduates with degrees that can't find work. Those of us that graduated a few years ago have been completely knackered by the system even though our degrees were worth something when we took them. Sadly employers assume they're the same dumbed down degrees being offered now. So many elements in some have been removed because the little darlings find it too difficult. Marking schemes made more generous as too many of them were failing. Not to mention the numbers that just buy their work online that can't be checked as the 'essay writing' read cheaters helpers that have these services will not have their work submitted to any of the plagiarism checking systems so there is no way of proving a student submitted their own work.
Higher Education is nothing like it was. It's a service industry now. You pay your money and students expect a degree at the end of it and blame everyone else if they don't get the results they think they deserve.
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