Critical Review of the Article “The changing body of students - A study of the motives, expectations and preparedness of postgraduate marketing students”
The fact is that the body of postgraduate marketing students, who decide to study in UK, has become much more different during the last few years. It means that British marketing educators are facing big challenges as well as great opportunities. In order to help the educators keep up with the pace of the change, researches about the postgraduate marketing students have been conducted. According to Liu (2010), the article - “The changing body of students - A study of the motives, expectations and preparedness of ...view middle of the document...
According to Taylor (2002), it shows a increasing wish of international students that they need the postgraduate qualifications to help their further development in career. All the situations above influence the postgraduate education environment in UK greatly. Therefore, further researches of postgraduate students are required. Liu (2010) claims that fewer researches focus on the motives, expectation and preparedness of postgraduates, and it is important to find out how they impact the students in entering a postgraduate programme. Liu (2010) states that the motives of the students include intrinsic, extrinsic and factors about their career in the future, and students believe that a postgraduate qualification could provide better support for their further development both in their life and work. It is very interesting that some of the international students decide to take a postgraduate programme just because they want to stay in UK longer (Liu, 2010). According to the research of Liu (2010), the marketing postgraduate students expect high quality of the studying support and resources, and they think it is very necessary and important to have practical experience in the universities as well because they could recognize the “value of money”. Comparing with the high expectation, preparedness of the students seems poor. It is very common that many of the students are lack of not only work experience, but also even related skills and related knowledge about marketing (Liu, 2010). The situation nowadays is that increasing numbers of students, especially international students, are driven to take a marketing postgraduate programme with high expectation and poor preparedness by desire of postgraduate qualification to support their future life. Liu (2010) suggests that future researches could focus on different backgrounds of the students and their influences depending on the diversity of them.
According to Liu (2010), both the theoretical context and the methodological context of the research about marketing postgraduate students’ motive, expectation and preparedness are discussed in the article. Variety of secondary data is used in the part of theoretical context. By collecting data from the prior researches, Liu (2010) has explained that learning approaches, which are related with students’ prior-learning experience, affect the outcomes of learning a lot, and focuses on the problems of the international students. It is apparent that the prior-learning experience of the international students such as learning style is very different comparing with local British students, and it might cause trouble for them, for instance, Chinese students to transit from undergraduate education to postgraduate in UK (Egege and Kutieleh, 2003). Different views of the postgraduate program exist between educators who hope that students could be more prepared for the program and students whose expectation on the program is high, and owing to...
