to fellow uni students, particularly those in the UK

[ambientlight]

my undergrad experience:
- two courses a term (out of eight/nine final courses)
- one to two essays a week
- tutorials with one tutor and zero to two other students
- no coursework; exams count for everything

my postgrad experience:
- four courses a term (= all the courses i am taking)
- no regular essays (except coursework which counts towards my degree)
- discussion seminars with up to 20 students o_o;;
- no exams; coursework counts for everything.

i am getting the impression that my undergrad experience was an anomaly (though this isn't new to me), and that my postgrad experience actually resembles that of the standard UK undergrad, maybe. except that undergrads have exams.

thoughts? i really can't get over the facts that 1) i don't have regular essays, 2) seminars are so huge. how does one have a coherent/useful discussion in such large groups? :|

Comments

[erushi.livejournal.com]

i must confess that i was actually quite envious of oxfords small tutorial size. it's a little difficult to say just how useful larger tutorials are. the size does mean that you can get away with not doing your reading, but most probably think that too (and really, trying to do all the reading for 4 or 5 different modules and your tutorial reading is really a bit much), and even if you have done the reading and know the answers, you probably wouldn't really want to volunteer as well as it often feels quite odd when everyone else isn't volunteering anything. i'd say how useful they are really depends on how useful you want to make it, i guess?

though much depends on the teachers too. some teachers soldier on, and after a while, people do start speaking, so you get stuff. other times, the teacher just sort-of talks at you in between many Significant Pauses, and there is much awkward silence to be had. i've had teachers who themselves veer off-point, much to the frustration of students; teachers who just read out of a textbook and would ignore you if you brought something up relevant to the tutorial but not according to her outline plan (e.g. mentioning something that might suit point 3 when she's on point 2)... i suspect a large class creates a distance between the tutors and the students, such that it's much easier to be operating on different tracks in a larger tutorial than it would be in the conversation-like setting of a smaller tutorial.

[ambientlight.livejournal.com]

the size does mean that you can get away with not doing your reading
haha, yeah - coupled with the lack of essays (and of exams!!), there is very little incentive for me to do much reading, unless the topic is relevant to my dissertation/i'm interested in a topic/i intend to write my coursework essay on a topic. :|

the seminar today didn't have a problem with silences - quite the opposite. if anything i felt that some people were being irrelevant when they spoke, but clearly there is no nice way to say this...

"how useful they are really depends on how useful you want to make it" - but what can one do to influence large group discussions except try to contribute? ._.