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Original post by CJKay
I don't remember the last time I turned up to a lecture and I still managed 70% first and second year thanks to Blackboard. I absolutely cannot stand having to wake up early to go to uni, pay for the travel to get there, sit there for 2 hours trying to decode a monotonous thick accent and actually try to take in wtf is being said when I can barely concentrate on keeping my eyes open. All that happens is that I come out wasting £9000, and then £60 a month due to unnecessary travel.


I couldn't agree with you more:smile:
A lot of lecture powerpoints, audio recordings get posted on the university department's website secure server. Some lecturers also having a direct mailing list of the students and send the lectures directly.

If you're paying £9000 a year to go to Uni then in my opinion you can do whatever the hell you want.
Everyone learns in different ways. Also it's easy to find better resources and lectures from other universities on particular topics. E.g for medicine, if a module is biochemistry, physiology etc you can get 90% + without attending lectures because you can learn those things by yourself, with the use of textbooks, online resources.
Some lecturers also suck. Plain and simple.
Especially for a subject like medicine. Most of the lecturers will be practicing doctors, surgeons, clinicians who take time out of their regular work to give lectures so a lot of them may not necessarily be very good at giving lectures or teaching.
Why would someone get up to go to a 8am lecture for a topic that they could probably learn better at home with better resources and better online lectures?

Some lectures can be HOURS long and unless you're in a position to leave when you're tired, you dont want to end up sitting front row of a 4 hour lecture by a bad lecturer on a topic you could probably learn easier by yourself at home.
I just find lectures unpleasant, really, there's too many people in the lecture hall (sometimes on my course they just can't fit everyone in one room). It's really hard to concentrate when the main problem is trying to find enough desk space to make notes. So sometimes I'll miss a lecture or two. It's easy enough to catch up, all the lecturers apart from one just read off the handouts we're given and it's easy enough to construct a decent set of notes from those and then extra reading from textbooks etc.

I've only missed a few actual teaching lectures so far, and it's so early in the term for me that I don't think it'll matter too much. I am finding it hard to get back into academic work after the summer holidays, I think I just burned myself out after working too hard for A levels :/

I know I'm paying £9000 a year (which seems like way too much to me, the course is definitely not worth that) plus all the rent and the other costs but current it doesn't seem worth it. To be honest, if there was any way of getting the job I want without first enduring four years of university and increasing debt to get a degree, I'd take it.
It is the fact that there seems to be a fantastic amount of lecturers who seem to believe it is a chore to stand in front of us and teach. I get the distinct impression that they don't want to be there. I understand that they probably don't want to be teaching a load of first or second years when they could be adding to their soon-to-be-released paper or textbook, but I sure as hell don't want to be listening to such miserable pricks, either. Something that will always stick in my mind is a revision lecture, with the lecturer wanting all 300-odd of us in the room to contribute. I'm sorry, but no one is going to do that in such a large group. Amidst the deafening silence, I heard the lecturer saying something along the lines of 'I feel I've wasted my time here today, when I could have been sitting in my office researching.'

If that doesn't ****ing alienate the students, I don't know what does.

Oh and also the fact that you READ for your degree, not listen to people barking information to you for a couple of hours a week. If one put their mind to it, one could not leave the comfort of your room for a year and get as good a degree as someone who goes to every lecture. Self-directed study is the key.
Reply 84
Because university is all about independent study. Some of us have learnt to identify lectures/ seminars that offer us no new knowledge or support and instead of attending these we can study more effectively ourselves.

So for example student A who attends every lecture and seminar he's a keen bean and takes notes in every lecture he tries to absorb all of the knowledge by note taking and listening to the lecturer at the same time mean he doesn't get everything.

Person B attends some lectures and seminars but not all of them. He catches up on the ones he's missed by careful studying of lecture slides etc. he takes notes in his own time and does wider reading. He comes away with more knowledge then the dude that went to lecture.
As stated earlier, you don't pay for the education, you pay for the piece of paper at the end of the x years. If you don't need to go to the lectures to get whatever your target is then why go? For example,. if you have a module on something you already know you can do then why go to the lectures? Stay at home, work on other things (or rest) and keep an eye on the online notes and just check you do know it.

If you can get a first without attending any lectures then why bother going to any of the lectures? There is minimal real benefit from it, obviously there is, but is there enough to justify the time investment?
Lectures and Seminars actually work out as £50 per one...if you're paying £9,000 that is so it is completely worthwhile going to them or you/your parents are out of pocket.
Reply 87
I try to get in for my lectures, but i'm not a machine - I am capable of weighing up whether it is worth the 1 hour commute each way for a lecture I could just look up online.

Though I try to get to as many as possible just so that I don't get into lazy habits.
For myself i do tend to have pretty poor attendance however that's because the assessments tend not to be about every little subject making some irrelevant (especially if its a module i'm not massively keen on) and secondly because you have to read around to get a good grade anyway so i can just additionally read anything i may have missed in lectures/seminars. To not have to read around for most subject assessments means either your lecture slides are amazingly detailed, your subject matter amazingly narrow, or your universities teaching you something too easy.
Original post by hutch12345
Lectures and Seminars actually work out as £50 per one...if you're paying £9,000 that is so it is completely worthwhile going to them or you/your parents are out of pocket.

That's a very faulty analysis, you don't pay per lecture/seminsar/practical, you pay a fixed rate. Or are you suggesting that we should go to see the doctor every time we get a runny nose?
My attendance got worse as the years went by. I realised that it was pointless to go to a chunk of lectures when the majority of information was on blackboard. I didn't have to get up early. I didn't have to waste money driving 40 minutes to uni and trying my best to stay awake in a lecture that was extremely boring.
In my current and final year, almost all my lecturers give you all the info you need to do well in the exam in the lecture slides and problem sets. Which makes me more likely to attend lectures.

And one of my lecturers is bubbly and bright, so you cannot not listen to her. :smile:
Reply 92
I think that live lectures will be abolished at some point in the near future. Nobody really needs them. Content can just be put online only so that students can cover it whenever and wherever they want.

Seminars are different. This is where you have to communicate and dissect what you have learned, and preparing to do that, and then doing it, helps you understand material better and helps the lecturer assess your strengths and weaknesses. It is in theory a much more active learning experience. However, I did have a feeling when I was a student that lecturers are not that good at leading seminars - they don't seem to know how to make students prepare and then draw them out to participate. (Typically a school teacher would be much better at that than a lecturer, because of training in engagement and interaction, but it's not that hard.) I think universities should make all lecturers take a course on how to lead active seminars. And then I would make seminar attendance compulsory, with a short compulsory quiz at the beginning of each seminar to make sure that every student has done the required preparation.
(edited 9 years ago)
They are the ones who will drop out of course in the long run.
I rarely attended lectures or seminars mainly because I don't learn well at all from having someone talk at me for an hour. Seminars yeah probably should've gone but again, I don't really gain much from talking things through with other people. I learn best by studying from a textbook by myself in all honesty, and the fees you pay are ultimately so that you gain a degree. For me, the money was still worth it to get my degree, and I still got my 2.1 by ignoring lectures etc and just getting on with the work in my own time, in the way I learn best.

Also, all the information from lectures is on the powerpoint slides that are put on Blackboard. So rather than go in for a 9am double lecture, too tired to focus and probably giving up on making notes halfway through, I preferred to read through them when I wanted to and do the studying when I wanted to. Unis don't like it if you don't go in, they threatened to kick me out a couple of times but ultimately if you're getting good grades they can't really argue. I would imagine it's if your grades come back badly that it becomes a problem, for me this didn't happen so managed to get away with it.
(edited 9 years ago)
Original post by Xyloid
Because I learn **** all from boring, monotone, old miserable people who have no way of making my subjects interesting.

I have always maintained that if I was given all of the course material in one place I can sit down on my own with a cup of tea and the internet and pass my course.

Then i remembered Blackboard exists which allows for just this.

I averaged 75% last year so it seems to be working.


Couldn't have said it better myself.

Even universities know that lecturing is an inefficient way of teaching but it's very cheap and doesn't take long, so it's done.
All of you saying that you rarely attend.. Don't you get warnings? This isn't an urban legend. People do get kicked off courses if their attendance is abysmal without an authorised absence!

I've missed a few days here and there and blackboard doesn't do me any justice when trying to catch up. Just a presentation alone & 3 bullet points won't teach you anything as the lecturer often expands their points etc. And explains their slides. There's a reason why people with poor attendance get awful grades (if they don't happen to get kicked out).
I dont think my uni every kept an offical record of attendance. As long as we turned up to exams and made coursework deadlines it was fine. I went to all my lectures but I did not learn much. As someone who has been in my cereer since uni, I think it was a waste of time for the most part.
hardly gone, due to lazyness really but I'm picking it back up.

Some lectures are extremely boring, but I like to be there to pick up anything which I most likely wouldn't at home from the slides.
Original post by Jammy Duel
That's a very faulty analysis, you don't pay per lecture/seminsar/practical, you pay a fixed rate. Or are you suggesting that we should go to see the doctor every time we get a runny nose?



You pay £9000 a year so each lecture works out at £50. Im not suggesting you pay per seminar all I'm saying is thats how it works out. If you think of it as £50 per seminar then you're less likely to not go and waste your money.

Im fully aware of the finance behind universities which is why i replied to this thread. If you don't like what i put on it then you are not obliged to reply to my post.

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