Special Tuition for Graduates and College Stint

Currently, graduate students studying taught courses (MSc, MSt, MPhil, BPhil and some other courses) and PRS students regularly receive from their supervisors and others hours of what is called ‘special tuition’. These hours are essentially single tutorials and are indeed paid at the regular Senior Tutors’ Committee single rate. Graduates are not normally permitted to receive more than 16 hours of such tuition per term without special permission from the relevant Divisional Board.

For graduate supervisors who have several taught-course students working in their specialist areas, this can represent an increased work-load equivalent to having an equal number of additional undergraduate students requiring weekly single tuition. Some Colleges (e.g. Merton and St Hilda’s) now permit their Tutorial Fellows to count such ‘special tuition’ hours for taught graduates against their College undergraduate stint. I suggest that Corpus consider allowing this from October 2002. Tutors wishing to count such hours against College stint would naturally be obliged to have the University’s fees for these hours made payable to the College (the current University claim form allows this); this would be precisely analogous to the system for counting non-Corpus undergraduate tuition against Corpus stint as already done by most tutors, and the fees would of course be at the same rate.

It might be thought that this idea should await the results of the current discussions between the Conference of Colleges and the Divisions on the reform of the joint contract for Tutorial Fellows. But any firm proposals on that front still seem some way off, and, in the current climate of concern about overall workload for Tutorial Fellows, it would be rational to adopt such a mild (and costless) alleviation of teaching duties now if we think it is the right thing to do. Any ultimate scheme of stint reform would naturally have to consider this issue afresh in a new overall context, but that is no reason for not improving things now.

To provide a safeguard against excessive imbalance between graduate and undergraduate tuition (the College would presumably not be happy were too much of a Tutorial Fellow’s stint employed in this way), it would be prudent also to propose a maximum for the number of tutorial hours that might be so counted. A reasonable figure would be one-sixth of overall stint, i.e. at present no more than an average of two weekly hours over the whole academic year for 12-hour CUF joint postholders, no more than 1 weekly hour for 6-hour ULTF joint postholders.

I propose then that Corpus’ Tutorial Fellows be allowed to count hours of graduate special tuition against their College tutorial stint from October 2002, subject to the following conditions :

(i) that such hours constitute no more than one-sixth of maximum stint, averaged over whole the academic year;

(ii) that the University payments for such hours be made over to the College.

Stephen Harrison 15.5.2002