Teaching Matters: The current debate about universities lacks an element that would be considered essential in any other enterprise - the customer perspective. Students, and their unions, are the dog that doesn't bark in this debate, and I believe we are the poorer for it, writes Danny O'Hare

Students' unions have two key functions. One is to be a political training ground, and an outlet for the idealism that characterises most young people. But, closer to home and at least equally important, is the role they can play in influencing the behaviour and strategy of the educational institutions where their members are the customers. They have largely abdicated this role in favour of providing student entertainment and, to judge from events at NUI Galway, agitating for adequate student car parking.

Why don't students' unions focus on teaching quality and fair systems of grading? We have a system in which there is almost no teacher training at third level. People with technical knowledge of their subject are assumed to be able to teach it, an assumption whose patent falsity is demonstrated every day in lecture halls up and down the country. But on this critical issue the opinions of the victims are rarely voiced.

The institutions have mechanisms to listen to individual student concerns. However, they work sporadically at best because of students' fears that they will be victimised if they complain about, for example, bad teaching. Students' unions, though aware of such fears, have failed to come up with a way to deal with them.

It is true that quality assessment processes now include provision for student input. But is this adequate? How many have built student opinion questionnaires into their appraisal schemes? How many students' unions have agitated for this to happen? Very few, or none, is the answer.

More fundamentally, surely it is within the remit of student unions to question the continued over-reliance on lectures as the basic teaching method? Lecturers still require students to attend lectures which consist - as they always have - of the lecturer writing on a blackboard, talking as he or she did so, while students try to listen above the noise and write some notes that might remind them of what they thought they understood. The now widespread availability of other media to disseminate basic information should be freeing university teachers to revert to the tutorial form of interaction with students - a change that students and their unions should be championing. But are they?

Another serious issue that concerns every student is the quality of assessment and marking processes, given that the grade a student achieves can determine their entire future career. Problems include the incorrect use and grading of multiple choice questions, the spurious accuracy of marking schemes in what are non-scientifically controlled tests, and decisions on grading students that are based on unsound processes. These issues have been highlighted by John Heywood's work at TCD, which showed clearly that marking within 5 per cent to 10 per cent accuracy is impossible. Yet students are routinely given a mark of, say, 49 per cent to indicate a pass and 61 per cent to indicate an honour.

Students' unions have been disinclined to research such issues and to present their considered views to the academic community. Perhaps they should consider aligning themselves with that obvious but mostly neglected source of educational expertise, the universities' own education departments. They could work together to rebalance the current over-reliance on research as the only driver of educational development, and restore teaching and learning to a respected place.

Another area in which students' unions have been largely silent is the composition of the student body itself. Who gets to go to university in the first place? Is our system of allocating places fundamentally unfair, as it focuses exclusively on narrow academic performance and fails to take account of, for instance, personality, motivation, commitment, innovative attitudes and personal aptitudes suited to particular careers?

Even more surprising in view of their idealistic bent, student unions are today largely silent on the issue of wider access to third level. Once they were a constant thorn in the side of the government about the inadequacy of student support grants. That concern seems to have been largely silenced since the abolition of fees - though that measure was irrelevant to the concerns of disadvantaged students, who never had to pay fees anyway.

Perhaps the reason for all this silence from students' unions is that they are now a part of the power structure and that their objectivity has been compromised as a result. The tradition of students "knowing their place" has changed radically in recent years and this lulls us into the serene thought that the voice of the student is now heard, acted upon and focused on the right issues.

But are they listened to any more attentively by the academic community than they were in the 1960s and 1970s? And this, notwithstanding their involvement as members of governing boards and, in some cases, academic councils.

Many academics, while believing strongly that students should speak out on the great social issues of our time, are much less enthusiastic when the same students express views on the academic enterprise itself. Do academics really believe that student opinions on academic matters amount to anything?

Dr Danny O'Hare is a former president of DCU.