No room for TISEM repeaters

“You have to be able to actually finish your studies in four years time.” said studentparty ECCO during the faculty meet for the Tilburg School of Economics and Management on Wednesday October first. ECCO points out that some workgroups in the bachelor Bedrijfseconomie (Business Economy) are not available for students that are repeating the classes. Workgroups, for instance, for Macro-Economics and Introduction to Organisational Theory do not allow students that are taking the class for the second time.

Professor Pavel Cizek says this is because of space issues. “We don’t prohibit entry but we only have a limited amount of workgroup hours to work with. Without repeaters there are nine to ten workgroups (with about 350 students). Adding repeaters leads to 500 to 550 students, meaning that the amount of workgroups cannot hold them all.” Cizek emphasizes that it’s just impossible to place them all. “Repeaters keep stacking up through the years.”

There’s just too many students, or so it seems. ECCO, however, states that open spots in the workgroups are not being used. “Places open up when students drop uit, but teachers don’t allow the repeaters to take up these newly opened spots.” Elske van de Ven from Ecco sent her reply to Univers via mail: “Instead of using these open spots for repeaters they merge the smaller groups into a few bigger ones so they are all full and teachers have to fill less hours.”

Lex Meijdam, dean of the faculty, said during the faculty meeting: “It is strange that we’re treating repeaters and first time students differently. It could very well be a financial decision, but if it is there’ll have to be clear arguments behind it. And it is up to us to find out what these arguments are. There is no real management policy that is used here. The difference between treatment of students is strange.

Van de Ven’s question was based on her own personal experiences, but when we asked Fons Naus, chairman of the educational committee, it became obvious that he was aware of these situations but that it had never formally been handled before. “We’ve seen it happen, repeaters being discouraged to participate in classes. Their exams then count for 100%.”