The beginning of the 2023 academic cycle, with the return of face-to-face classes, offers a panorama at the UNLP Faculty of Medicine with crowded classrooms, in which students can be directly seen following a class from the floor.
The situation is linked in that academic community with the massiveness in the first year, in a Faculty that in less than a decade multiplied its enrollment by ten, to put it in the order of 33 thousand students. That is about a quarter of the total that the University gathers in its 17 faculties. Everything has changed since, in 2015, the qualifying admission course was annulled by provision of the national law governing higher education. Until then, the income could be around between 300 and 500 students, far from the around 5 thousand who, it is estimated, may be studying their first year today and one of their core subjects, such as Anatomy.
In one of the theorists of this matter, the one from Chair C, yesterday there was an influx that overflowed the classroom. It was not the only time.
The testimonies collected by this newspaper, together with the photos and videos that circulated, indicate a new cause for concern and discomfort about the conditions in which the classes are held and medical professionals are trained.
In the images you can see several students sitting on the floor of a classroom, during a class on Anatomy C.
According to what students consulted yesterday told this newspaper, the complaints have already been exposed in that chair. There was a meeting with the tenured professor, “who expressed that he would be willing, if the authorities of the faculty accept, to use the Aula Magna so that our courses are of quality,” he indicated.
Specifically, they look for larger spaces to house the class in which the practical activity commissions meet. It was estimated yesterday that in a chair like that there could be a little more than 2,000 students divided into commissions of up to 250. The theoretician, given by the head of the chair, can present the entire enrollment.
In addition, from a student group they expressed that “students need more space to be able to study anatomy theorists in conditions, since the classrooms where it is currently studied do not have the capacity to accommodate more than 250 people.”
Then they added: “Our colleagues tell us that each theoretician fills up even more and they cannot understand the subject nor ask questions.”
REQUEST
It was for this reason that they put together a petition for the students to sign, and so it is elevated to the authorities of the faculty.
The head of the chair in question, Ángel Narduzzi, said in this context that “this always happens in the first days of the course, it always happens. However, students have the possibility of listening to classes virtually and in person. At the beginning, there are always crowding and that, later, decreases, ”he said.
For her part, a student of the subject analyzed that “it is clearly seen that there is no place for anything. Everyone is sitting on the floor, on the stairs, there were people who were listening from outside”. The young woman claimed an advance with the allocation of a larger space. “Now, they were going to collect a sign to be able to request the main classroom, which is one of the largest in the faculty. But having so many students and few places is horrible, ”she said.
The dictation of the subject of Anatomy is divided between three chairs (A, B, C). They are of free choice but have the quota distributed based on the total number of students. “This has to do with the lack of classrooms commensurate with the number of students,” a source from that community with past experience in student representation told this newspaper.
As was the case with the recurring mouths in the qualifying entrance exam, in the context of the pandemic (during the last three years), when classes were held virtually, they insisted on complaints about the massive postponements in midterm exams. subjects of different stages of the career. Among those, Anatomy.
Also yesterday the board of directors of the faculty met. Along with a request for reports from the bench of graduates on the budget that the faculty will receive this year, the students asked to extend the validity of 2018 practical work, implement a final table in April, improve enrollment in the courses and that suspend the new correlativity from first to second year (requirement of the end of biology to study biochemistry), among other points.
