By Carolyn Foster Segal. The news that the BBC-sponsored dog named Pete, using the alias Peter Smith, has procured an online M.B.A. from the American University of London has sent our household into a literal tailspin. It is not the first time that our cat, Finn Segal, has disappointed us by failing to live up to our expectations, but this may be the last straw. Perhaps most disconcerting is that even now he shows no concern and has stubbornly assumed his usual meatloaf position in a sunny spot. Read more...

By William G. Durden. Several decades ago – long before the level of technological sophistication we experience today -- I was part of a movement begun by the late Julian Stanley, a psychology professor, and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY) to save academically talented youth from boredom in the schools. The most controversial instrument to rescue them was a pedagogical practice called, rather prosaically, "Diagnostic Testing Followed by Prescriptive Instruction" or, shorthand, “DT>PI.” It was principally applied to the pre-collegiate mathematics curriculum and relied on just a few key assumptions and practices:
1. Students already know something about a subject before they formally study it.
2. Test students before a course begins and then just instruct them on what they don’t know.
3. Test students again when you as the instructor and they as learners believe they have competency in a subject.
4. Move immediately to the next level of instruction. Read more...

By Sophie Grubb. We're paying huge fees, but students like me aren't getting a fair amount of contact time. In first year I found having an empty timetable a novelty. It was something to be smug about as my peers went to a full day of lectures and I stayed at home and watched an entire series of Friends. But come my third year of journalism, media and cultural studies, I started to question what I was paying thousands of pounds for. Even the universities minister David Willetts reckons universities are putting research before teaching. More...

Bravo Manchester University economics students for criticising "university courses for doing little to explain why economists failed to warn about the global financial crisis" (Economics students rebel at orthodox free-market syllabus, 25 October). However, there could be no explanation of why economists had failed to warn about the crisis, precisely because a significant number of high-profile non-neoclassical economists had warned about the crisis. More...