Pandemic Precedent: Lab Hours

Some big educational changes happened in the last year. They demand considerable reflection in the years to come. I want to focus on the way that required lab hours were reduced by the RSC for the purposes of accreditation.

Was the lab requirement as important as it seemed?

Context

The RSC reduced the required lab hours for the pandemic, permitting courses with ‘a reduction of no more than a quarter in the total time that students spend in the laboratory across their entire programme’ to retain their accredited status. The accreditation documentation states that a BSc Chemistry degree, ‘ students should typically complete at least 300 timetabled hours’, so a BSc student might have lost roughly 75 lab hours.

If lab hours can be reduced, why aren’t they always reduced?

This reduction was framed in a very pragmatic way (you can’t teach labs when a deadly virus is transmitted by close working), but raises the big question in marketised HE: is a degree a piece of paper, or is it a sequence of learning experiences?

If it’s a piece of paper, then the reduction of lab hours should be sustained. Lab teaching is expensive and can exclude students with (e.g.) caring responsibilities. Minimising the threshold number of lab hours would be cheaper and more inclusive; we should do it all the time if reduced hours still satisfy the required professional standards.

If it’s a sequence of learning experiences, then students have been denied the degree they signed up for. This cohort have been in labs less than they thought they would, and might have a reasonable basis to explore recourse such as specific performance (the lab time they were promised) or tuition refunds.

The horns of an argument

If lab hours really are that important, then pandemic students should not be able to gain accreditation on the basis of their reduced-labs undergraduate degree. If lab hours aren’t really that important, then the 300 required hours were inappropriately high in the first place.

And if it’s the learning outcomes which are important rather than the hours? Then the 300 hours requirement should be removed from accreditation documentation: it is unimportant how many hours students do, so long as they accomplish the learning outcomes. This is, I think, my position.