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associateship course pass all five technical CEI part II
In fact the staff claim that many could do so on completion of the Higher Diploma and that the main emphasis on the Associateship course is on the Engineer in Society paper which causes a lot of difficulty. Associate students from the department have won the Wallace Premium of the Institution of Structural Engineers for several years in succession. This premium is awarded to the student sponsored by the Institution with the highest overall examination marks in the CEI part II papers.
TEACHING AND EXAMINING
The Baptist College staff consciously adopt a 'bookish' approach to instruction. The teaching is didactic and scholastic with little attempt made to allow students to question, or to use their own initiative. Staff have little experience in developing laboratory work, so that the laboratory work on offer is very closed with little opportunity for students to open out the experiments and to develop them. This closed approach by the staff to education in which the course is taught by staff rather than being a learning process by the students has been a disappointment to members.
Students clearly enjoy the intellectual thrill of academic study but the course does not provide the necessary facility for an opening of their minds to a more critical awareness of the subject.
There is limited contact between students and the academic staff. Students feel much freer to approach the demonstrators/tutors for help. These tutors also mark a lot of the students' work. While their work is conscientious members do not consider that the tutors are sufficiently experienced as teachers for the marking to be of as much benefit to the students as it could be.
A design project is carried out as part of students' design work but there is no major project as part of the students final year and this again is a missed opportunity for the course to open up. To be fair though, the staff have no experience of the type of practical project which might be carried out and so are perhaps best advised not to attempt to do something they are not qualified to do well.
The Baptist College has a good tradition of teaching communications studies but this is in a separate department and does not greatly affect the Civil Engineers. There is also a helpful little centre for the provision of educational hardware and some educational
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