‘Students are paying the price’: More than half of uni tutorials at least double the ideal size
A recent survey reveals that more than half of university tutorials in Australia have more than double the ideal number of students. This increase has led to a decline in student engagement and satisfaction, with many students feeling overlooked. The findings highlight a growing crisis in the higher education sector as universities struggle with overcrowded classes and reduced support for students.
- ▪62% of university staff reported an increase in tutorial sizes since 2019.
- ▪The ideal tutorial size is between 10-19 students, but over half now host 30 or more.
- ▪78% of staff observed worsening student engagement and learning outcomes.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/students-are-paying-the-price-more-than-half-of-uni-tutorials-at-least-double-the-ideal-size-20260526-p600ot.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 19:30:00 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T09:37:47.770Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T09:37:47.770Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | UxCcvhuPqZZh |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.