<p>I know that the Tripos are EXTREMELY important, but it there any other assesment during the year, or do you spend it all studying.</p>
<p>The “Tripos” is actually the course you will be studying at Cambridge, e.g. “History Tripos”, “Engineering Tripos”. It’s not technically an exam.</p>
<p>The triposes are normally assessed by an intense set of tests in May/June that make up most of your grade for that year. However, this does differ from subject to subject. For example I think the Architecture tripos has a significant amount of assessed portfolio work.</p>
<p>During the year you have to prepare work for weekly supervision sessions with senior academics or PhD students (generally, this means problem sets for Science subjects and essays for Arts subjects). Although you will get feedback on these they don’t count towards your final grade.</p>
<p>Aside from end-of-year exams, most subjects have at least some amount of pre-exam assessment. There’s compulsory lab work for science subjects, and some arts subjects will let you submit an essay in place of one exam. In addition most (if not all) subjects require a thesis in the final year, which will probably be around a quarter of your final year grade.</p>
<p>Check the university website for details on your subject. :-)</p>