Oxford postgraduate workload

Brill, thank you for your responses.
I'm glad to hear that there should be no weekly essays.
The workload of reading and contact hours does not bother me too much as I love what I am studying and find reading about it exciting.
Good luck to your daughter !!

Loos like a lot of work but exciting times.

Hi all,

I've seen that students at undergraduate level have to complete like 2,000 word essays per week alongside their usual coursework for their modules.

Is this the same at postgraduate at Oxford ?

It depends how your course is taught. A 2,000 word essay per week might be expected in an advanced paper at postgraduate level that is taught using the 'tutorial' system. For comparison, my Masters at Oxford typically had the following workload per week:

- Mathematics assignment (including submission of written paper equivalent to an essay with answers in - very little reading to do but was complicated work);
- Reading for seminar (varied - generally never less than 300 pages, sometimes way way beyond this);
- Reading for lecture (as above - varied between weeks, could be a few hundred pages, could be a thousand);
- Presentation preparation (usually, each student had to present twice per term in the seminars - this involved an enormous amount of work)
- Tutorial reading (as with seminars, workload varied - generally never than 200 pages, sometimes way over) - this was x 2 as two advanced papers at once;
- Tutorial essays (one for each paper, per week, usually expected to be 2,000 words each);
- Coursework essays (these usually, although not always, derive from the Seminar work, but you are expected to undertake original research beyond the reading list provided);
- Thesis reading (this needs to go on all year if you've any chance of getting a good grade).

On top of this, there were "optional" parts of the course that, whilst you weren't formally required to attend, it was frowned upon not to show up. This would usually require the reading of one or two research papers per week.

In fact, now that I've written it out, I have no idea how I ever got through it!

Daunting, yes, but it pays dividends to work hard, and the workload is manageable (however difficult it might seem). Lawyers (i.e. BCL/MJur) would probably have an even higher reading load than the above.

Thanks for your reply !
That does sound like an awful lot of work to do throughout the year and even each week.

I'm not particularly a fast reader so hopefully I will be able to keep up.

I'm going to be starting an Mst in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, which I believe uses the tutorial system.
Looks like I have a lot of reading and work to do.