Persisting difficulties

5.7.2.1.

Time pressures

The second semester continued the process of working out appropriate time allocation to deal with demands that showed no signs of reduction. For some, such as

MB, first semester disappointments had conveyed the message that more hours were required: “the next semester I start assignments as early as possible.” Others felt it was time to seek a better study/life balance. This proved difficult to achieve:

I studying four paper and then I found that I try to make more sporting, to play squash every day or something like that, but at the end, by the end I found my paper the results not very good. Also I pass, but it’s not the high mark, or it’s not what I want. (May 5)

By the second year, however, time management functioned as a measure of achieved expertise, even for those who had added a part-time job to the demands:

I can balance my study and part-time job. Even not a good result but I’m all pass paper … this year I’ve got my part-time job so I think, ‘Oh! Next week I got a house-cleaning, got a extra job so this week I will try to work out my assignment first.’ (Mike 5)

Time, rather than incompetence, was now seen as the main cause of shortcomings in assignments: “Just no time to give me to find that how to make perfect” (May 5); “I don’t think I do it very well, but I just hand it because I still have the two paper, final exam need to prepare” (Saul 5). May’s attendance at lectures was a matter of balancing their predicted value against the demands of assignment preparation.

5.7.2.2.

Stress

Some students continued to experience quite intense stress. Gemma’s arose from the course work:

I never thought about giving up, ’cause, you know, what I’m after is a degree. I have to do it because my parents spent a lot of money on me. But sometimes I do get really stressed out, really like, you know, some assignment, this is really hard. (4)

There were also pressures related to the life stage they were at. TY, at 22, was just grappling with adult responsibilities:

we have lots of responsibility which, like, maybe we wasn’t aware that we have lots of things have to do by yourself, we always, like, expect someone else to do it … you find that heaps of problems comes at the same time, and you don’t know which step to go, and you, especially for international students, you don’t know who can help you. That’s why I think heaps of international students, they find partners, they live together and they just want some company.

Though their origin and solution might lie elsewhere, such problems could impinge on study. The highly successful Gao attributed his completely unforeseen failure of one paper in Semester Two to unspecified personal problems.

5.7.2.3.

Other difficulties

Saul was emerging from the fog of bewilderment which had characterised his first semester, but there were still areas of confusion for him and one of these was that the big picture often eluded him. He could see little connection between work done in tutorials and that of the lectures (“it’s like another project … such as this lecture I told you how to do the muffin and this tutorial I told you how to do the pie,” 5), and needed guidance to see how assignments related to course material. This seems closely related to his first semester challenge of knowing what to focus on, and to a persisting difficulty in knowing how to structure his writing and link different ideas together (“It’s very very random. … just write everything,” 6).

Understanding of vocabulary was not sufficiently precise for the fine distinctions required at this level:

I find that is quite tricky is in the exam and they always have this kind of question, such as, you just change one word and whole meaning is changed, you know, so, and A B C D, which one is right. You just remember the definition, and if you not understand very well, only change one word and whole the things are changed, so it is making me very, very confused. (4)

The language barrier remained throughout as these final semester comments indicate:

I can’t get all the meaning from the lecture, especially for speaking English, because if writing is I can read again but speaking is not. … but just get the main point, it’s better, it’s better than before. (Mike 5)

If the teachers talk very interesting issues and stuff, and using a flexible way I feel comfortable with that, and I can understand 70% or 80%. But I couldn’t understand 100% of what teachers said. But for me I think it is enough to get understand. (YQ 2)

This meant that those parts of the course content that were presented through the spoken word remained only marginally available, and Mike attributed his failure of a course in his second semester to this. It also meant, of course, that the students were operating “through a glass darkly” to some extent right to the end of their degrees.

5.7.2.4.

Adopting disapproved methods of learning under duress

Throughout their degree, the BBS students were still completing core papers, which took them into new and sometimes uncongenial disciplines. These could be sites that challenged their sense of membership and their embracing of the new learning practices that now presented themselves as the appropriate ways to be-and-do a university student. In these courses, they could still find that they did not know the discourse and that their questions were seen as ‘dumb’ (see 6.4).

For two of the students these late-entry courses had a mathematical component that presented an enormous barrier for them. Interestingly both resorted to measures that they felt were not sanctioned but in this case necessary to pass the papers. Saul pored over previous year’s papers and rote-learned all the examples:

I don’t know why this blah blah blah formula but I know how, you know, the whole process, so what I can do just remember the whole process, but I don’t worry about others. Otherwise I need to do a lot of reading and understanding, you know. No time to do that. (5)

His class mates found this method “quite dumb” but other approaches had led to disastrous failure in the first test in spite of “very, very good” preparation, so he needed an alternative.

Scott had found a Chinese version of the course that troubled him and, in spite of a clear choice made in the first semester to use L2 for his study, had learned it in Chinese rather than English:

It’s easy for me to memory in Chinese. And then I can translate into English. But for another paper generally I will do it memory in English, I won’t use the old method, which is, I think it’s a stupid method, to learn it in Chinese first. But for G101 I have to use this. Even if stupid, but it works for me, that’s OK. (5)