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[wegie]

I have to agree that 12 weeks of teaching is just plain too little. I do like two sets of exams though.

Unfortunately my understanding is that long-term retention is significantly lower if exams are end-of-semester instead of end-of-year.

Ah. But is that chicken or egg? Pretty much all the places that still work on a year-long calendar are the places at the top end of the Russell Group where the drop-out rate was always in the very low single figures to start with.

I think this is partly based on experimental studies with random assignment of participants to different retention intervals (where they knew there was a test at a certain time point) and partly on pre- and post-change data from the same institution.

Interestingly we are a top-of-2nd-tier regional research institution (our department offers AAB and accepts BBB) and have terms whereas our Very Prestigious And Huge regional no 1 (equivalent department offers AAA at least and probably AAA* if you can) has semesters.

I'm curious, Drspouse: your use of the term '2nd tier regional' isn't one I've heard being applied to the UK before. Is this a case of placing US categories onto the UK system, or do some people/places also divide British institutions up this way? (And what type of Unviersity would quality as a 2nd tier regional?)

At a guess, I'd say Drspouse's home base is non-Russell Group, but pre-92 and still heavily research-active. Think Lancaster, York or Leicester rather than Manchester, Leeds or the Golden Triangle.

[drspouse]

Yep, wegie has hit the nail on the head there - a category I made up but we are indeed pre-92, research active, non-Russell Group, and the majority of our students are from our broad region, and many of those apply as their first choice to the closest RG university which I'd therefore categorise as regional 1st tier. 

The students that apply to the regional RG choice will either be applying to mainly RG universities nationwide OR to mainly regional universities with differing quality but including a few in our category.

Is there an official term for our type of university apart from "pre-92, research active, non-RG"??

[science_expat]

Is there an official term for our type of university apart from "pre-92, research active, non-RG"??

Does this describe the 94 group? And what do you mean by "research active"? My place would fit this description but it's not "research intensive".

[drspouse]

Yes - we are in the 94 group - I guess I was vaguely aware of that fact but it didn't spring to mind.

So, to return to the original point, we have terms and are in the 94 group while our nearest RG members both have semesters; so it is not entirely a quality division.

[misterzed]

Warwick plc thinks it is more fancy to use these titles. Exeter also partly switched to ass and assoc prof, the result being that no-one outside the university has a clue what these titles mean. And the readers didn't like it because some of them became assoc prof, just like the former senior lecturers.... So basically that's a step back for them  (although for other they used this change to promote them to professor.
To make things complicated, Birmingham confers the title of associate professor to senior people who have "shown outstanding leadership in teaching, management and administration." Often people who haven't published or done research, but who need to be given some title as a reward to avoid that they retire as lecturer or senior lecturer... The title isn't taken very serious...

What's wrong with retiring as lecturer or senior lecturer?  (Other than the obvious negative financial impact, prestige of being "prof", etc.)

Asked and answered.