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The gaps in the educational system of Republic of Bulgaria and how it affects the university students. Education is seen as the driving force of a country economy, culture and advancement. How can we expect Bulgaria to be economically well when Its educational system doesn’t work the way It Is supposed to be. There are some mall points that are essential for any system to work, and in Bulgaria these “points” seem to be missing. Students are not motivated to study, because they know that there are other ways of passing the exams- as cheating.
Teachers on the other hand have cosmic expectations of their students without making an effort to teach them something. Classes that the students attend don’t prepare them for the exams that they have to sit at the end of the semester. Most teachers at the university In Bulgaria come to class and they think that you know it all about the exam and how you are going to pass it, how you are supposed to prepare for it. For example last year when we had syntax our teacher Just came to class and started teaching.
Furthermore she didn’t even explain us what are we doing and why we are doing It, we Just started taking totes about something that we have never heard of and we had no Idea what exactly she was talking about. That made the class very hard to understand as if it wasn’t already difficult enough subject. Another problem is that teachers ask students to do things that they haven’t prepared them for. For Instance, last year a girl that I know asked me to help her to write a comment on an article, the problem was that she didn’t know what exactly she was supposed to do.
She told me that their teacher never explained to them how to write a comment on an article so she wasn’t able to o it herself. It is really difficult when teachers expect from you things that you have never done before and no one has thought you how to do them. This Information gap that university students have is normal because they come from a different back ground and the teacher’s job is to get every student on the same page. A lot of students easily can enter a university even though they don’t meet the qualities to become a university student.
They sit an exam and even though they barely pass the exam (in many cases cheating) they are accepted to the university. In he article “Higher education in republic of Bulgaria”, E. Astronomy and V. Chevy explain that the reason for accepting under qualified students is that government finances the state universities “per person”. In order to get more money the universities take as many students as they can regardless of the fact that when they 1 OFF market”. This situation in Bulgaria shows that the reason for “over population” in the universities and not so efficient university education lies in the system itself.
The students that are accepted by the university and study in the same class are not n the same level, some of them are more advanced than the others and some need more preparation that the others. This problem is cause because there are no placement tests when a student is applying for a university. Students all take standard test or exams and those who have 3 (F) and those who have 6 (A) go to the same class/group. For example in our class (English studies 3rd year) There are a lot of students that are not on the same level.
We have classmates that weren’t even pass their first Practical English exam and they still continue to study even more advanced subjects; therefore they keep failing their exams. Additionally, whenever we have speaking activities these students don’t want to talk in front of their classmates and don’t want to participate in activities. Sometimes it is not fair for those who are not as well prepared as the others, because they are required to do things that they simply can’t because no one even thought these things.
Students are poorly motivated to come to class, this is a result by the fact that they have nothing to lose if they don’t come to class and some of them see it as a waste of time cause the teacher doesn’t give any information that they cannot find by themselves. This is a problem that I personally face because some of our teachers don’t come prepared to class and actually they waste our time rather than teach us something. Last year when I had syntax class I learned nothing by going to classes.
The teacher was explaining us the things in a very unclear way that. I got prepared for my exam by myself because going to classes wasn’t useful. Moreover it doesn’t matter if you go to classes because they let you to the exam anyway. The teachers would re-new their methods of teaching because standing in front of the class and only talking doesn’t help and the students get bored and learn nothing. This makes them not to want to come to class even more.
In order to improve the quality of the Bulgarian universities I think that they should introduce a new system for financing the universities. The government should introduce external assessment as in secondary education, students who want to graduate should sit an exam and universities should be funded based on how well their students do on these exam. In this way universities will focus not on the annuity but on the quality, they will hire more well-prepared teachers and the students will get better education.
Students will be pushed to work harder and the teachers will be motivated not to let them cheat on the exams and they will grade them more fairly. The university will monitor the teachers closely and not let them do their Jobs loosely. According to the article of David Greengage and Michelle Haynes Funding Universities to Meet National and International Challenges, in UK universities are not funded per students and the only results are efficiency, more enterprising and making students more competitive.
As we can see the university in Bulgaria has room for improvement. Changes must be made, actions should be taken, even though it is not easy to change a whole system with a scratch, it must be those graduates who come out of the universities.