This is an interesting article from Niall Ferguson who taught at Cambridge and Oxford before moving to Harvard (he’s now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution). It’s mainly about the US admissions scandal, but some of it may be useful to those thinking about Oxbridge applications.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/in-us-colleges-fake-it-sometimes-beats-merit-srlmlgkbb
It’s behind a paywall but this is the most salient part:
"It took me a while to figure the system out after I moved from British to American academia. At Cambridge and Oxford I had been directly involved in undergraduate admissions. I and my colleagues read the application forms, the sample essays and the answers to what remained of the old entrance examination. We spent long days interviewing the candidates.
The Oxbridge system has long been criticised for admitting too few pupils from state schools or ethnic minorities, but I did not regard my role as that of a social engineer. My goal was to pick the cleverest students, regardless of all other criteria, and my main preoccupation was to separate the truly bright from the well coached. I did not care if they could row or tap-dance. I wanted intelligence, because I would have to teach these people for three years and the last thing I wanted was to spend hours of my life with dunderheads.
Harvard was different. At first, naively, I couldn’t understand why a substantial proportion of my new students were there, as — to judge by their mid-term exam papers — they wouldn’t have stood a chance of an interview at Oxford, never mind a place. It was explained to me that a substantial chunk of undergraduates were “legacies” — there because their parents were alumni, especially generous alumni — and another chunk were the beneficiaries of affirmative action or athletics programmes. The admissions system was managed by professional administrators, not professors."
Yep. As I have said before, undergrad in England (from an American perspective) is grad-school-lite. You get admitted by the profs in the department(s) that offers your course, you take only classes in that/those department(s), and so at the top UK unis, despite England undergrad being 3 years long instead of 4, you are covering material that would be considered master’s level in the States.
Obviously there are unique aspects like the college system and tutorials that are rare in the US, but those also don’t differentiate England undergrad from England grad programs. The main differentiation is research opportunities (still much less common at the undergrad level in England and the rest of Europe).
Meanwhile, there’s a big split between the undergrad and grad school experience in the US, with the (traditional residential) “American college experience” defining undergrad (though many full-time MBA program experiences are close).
To be fair, tutorials are relatively rare in the UK too.
@Conformist1688 really? I assumed they were everywhere. My daughter has has a tutorial associated with every module so far at St. Andrews. Tutorial grades have been 10 percent of the grade, with half of that being graded problem sets and the other half being her participation in the tutorial.
I have been pleasantly surprised that all her chemistry tutorials were conducted by full PhDs. In math, it has been a mix.of.grad students and PhDs.
^ “Tutorials” are everywhere but traditional Oxbridge-style tutorials with a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio are pretty rare these days.
Most tutorials in the UK these days are akin to American discussion/TA/lab sessions/sections or infrequent meetings with a faculty advisor to make sure that you’re on track.
@PurpleTitan I guess St. Andrews is somewhere in between Oxbridge and US. Hers have 5 or 6 students. They are expected to actively participate and are graded on participation, ie if they hand you the dry erase marker you better be able to do a given problem on the board. They are typically one hour a week.
When I TAed chemistry at a UC there were 30-60 students in a discussion section and it was them asking me questions. Attendance was not mandatory and participation was not graded.
@VickiSoCal, in the UK, it depends a lot on the department/school (and resources per student of the school and tradition/emphasis of the department). Oxbridge are richest and have a comparatively high faculty+grad student to undergrad ratio. St A’s has a small (for the UK) undergrad student body.
Even in my day 1:2 was the standard, and 1:3 was more common than 1:1. As a PhD student (teaching fellows got paid the same, once they went beyond the minimum required hours that were part of their salary) the payment structure was designed to discourage you from doing 1:1 supervisions (in the late 80s/early 90s you received about 8 pounds per hour for 1:1, 12 pounds for 1:2 and 14 pounds for 1:3). I don’t think I did more than a couple of 1:1 supervisions in 3 years even when I had an odd number of students.
But no one got a grade. Your only grade was the classification on the final exam, and if you didn’t learn the material then you wouldn’t get a good result. People who didn’t show up were reported to the Director of Studies and that was exceedingly rare. The most interesting thing was that no solutions were provided, so you had to work them out too, and that wasn’t always possible for hard problems.
There may also be a difference between humanities and sciences. Doing history I had 1:1 tutorials (actually not even at Oxbridge) but Quite Some Time Ago. Essays were marked/graded, but the grades didn’t count for the final degree - it was more of a working guide - and then used as the basis of the tutorial.
Humanities tutorials at Oxford are mostly 1:2 (the ‘tute partner’ relationship is an important one!); 1:1 is less common but not rare (I was pretty jealous of the 1:1 tutorials with Roy Foster…); 1:3 uncommon (maybe more for 1st year English). Essays are not typically graded (even indicatively), but students complain when they don’t get marked ones back (for the feedback but also for exam review). Discussing / defending the essay is most of the tutorial. You aren’t graded at all on the tutorial itself, but obviously there is nowhere to hide (except behind your tute partner if you have one- hence their value- you can bail each other out!). You never ever ever miss a tutorial.
One of my grad student collegekids is TAing (physics) this year. Their discussion groups are as @VickiSoCal describes- optional and ungraded, though not as big.
StA’s seems to be neither fish nor fowl- much more American than a typical UK uni, but with aspects that are definitely more UK than US. It’s just it’s own self I guess!
In a lab science it is not generally possible to have the entire grade rest on the final. This semester in O Chem 2 and P Chem 2, the grades are 30% lab, 60% final and 10% tutorial. Tutorial grade is a mix of problem sets, discussion and sometimes an additional written exercise, for example in O Chem they were given an unpublished journal article and told to write an abstract.
In lab courses you must receive a passing grade on both the lab portion and the final exam to pass the course.
The same piece was reprinted in the Boston Globe. The following link might be more accessible than the one above.
There are some minor differences (part of the passage quoted above from the Times UK do not appear in the Globe).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/03/18/americans-don-believe-meritocracy-they-believe-fake-ocracy/oIee0oxJBBEaKcFa0olkHN/story.html
And this section is not in the UK version of the article “I soon learned how to deter the academically weaker brethren. By assigning a lot of reading and awarding some C grades, I was soon rid of them.”
The other thing Ferguson is forgetting/overlooking/ignoring is that not all his Harvard students will be history majors, or admitted for aptitude in history.