'The quality of education has gone': Monash students question tutorial cuts

"Face-to-face interactions with teaching staff are the most valuable part of our education. If you get rid of that, we are essentially paying thousands of dollars for a list of readings."

That was the view of one student in a recent Monash Law Students' Society survey of 881 respondents, as concerns mount over the future of face-to-face teaching at the university's Faculty of Law.

The faculty announced the change by email in October, overhauling its teaching models, cutting tutorials, reducing contact hours and expanding class sizes.

A law degree commencing in 2025 will cost a student upwards of $85,000, while students who graduated just five years ago accumulated less than half that debt.

What are students paying for?

The reduction in contact hours aligned with changes made across other Monash faculties and several universities nationally.

It was framed to benefit them.

Joel Law, a law student at Monash, said the change has only increased self-directed learning and almost completely removed learning directly from their teachers. 

“The room for engaging with each other was reduced,” Law said.

“They've truncated the lectures plus tutorials into one big seminar and then having group activities within the seminar, which basically just means they gloss over the content," he said.

“Classes tell you that you don't have time to go into this, don't have time to go into that, you have to do this on your own.”  

Ananya Pradhan, a fellow law student, said the framing from the faculty made the intent clear, even if the language tried to obscure it.

"We can tell very clearly that it is a cost-cutting tactic. They don't really care for the quality of education of their students, because if they did, they wouldn't be cutting tutorials," she said.

“They give you a minimum of four to five hours of reading, and three to four hours of [online] lectures before your two-hour workshop, which is just you in a room with 120 other students.

“The quality of education has gone," Pradhan said.

After five weeks of the new class structure, the Monash Law Students' Society (LSS) surveyed 881 law students. 

The results, released on April 7, were stark, with 94.7 per cent of students not supporting the reduction of contact hours. 

Students rated overall education quality an average of 4.3 out of 10 and the faculty's new model of "active learning" scored just 3.7.

Student responses were anonymous. 

"To send out an email entitled 'enhancing active learning' while removing the very forum where the best active learning is happening - the tutorials - is absolutely crazy. It's a slap in the face to students and screams of cost cutting," one respondent wrote.

Another wrote: "Tutorials were the most worthy part of my education. It was the only time that I got any extended interactions with teaching staff and to actively participate in my education."

Another stated the faculty has "merely cut costs at the expense of my learning, and kept everything else exactly the same. There has been no shift to active learning seminars - they are exactly the same as before. I feel deceived by Monash Law."

When asked about the cuts, both the Monash Faculty of Law and Law Students' Society (LSS) declined to comment. 

But on April 5, LSS president Thomas Hall responded to the changes with a letter.

"This letter is not a protest, it is a formal and considered expression of student concern, grounded in data collected across all cohorts in the LLB [Bachelor of Law]," Hall said.

"What I am hearing across the year levels and in unprecedented numbers is a genuine and deeply felt concern about the decreasing quality of legal education being received."

A recent ABC Four Corners report uncovered how class size expansion and contact hour cutting has been a move made by most major Australian universities. 

These have been justified as cost-cutting exercises, but the dire consequences are felt by students and teaching staff.

The Monash Faculty of Law has followed a path of similar changes, but it has made no mention of these changes being made in the name of cost cutting. 

Hall’s letter accused the faculty of increasing the intake of students and reducing the cost associated with running classes, while students are paying more than ever.

“Students are not naive and they understand the institutional pressures. However, they feel deceived when changes are framed as pedagogical improvements rather than resource constraints,” Hall wrote.

“The LSS asks the faculty to engage transparently with the students about the relationship between intake targets, resource allocation, and decisions about teaching delivery,” he wrote.

“Many students have questioned why unit fees remain unchanged while dedicated teaching time decreases and cohort sizes increase.”