University of Glasgow blether thread

But you don't need to be organised enough to work while at lectures.

Like I said, because semesters are so short and exams so early, your undergraduate degree is 3-5 years of crash courses, and cramming at the end is by far the easiest and most common way to get by.

If you are undisciplined, then that's fine because courses are short and you only need 2-3 weeks of studying to get by.

And its not fair to force students who actually want to take their time over their degree and learn it in an academic fashion to have to adopt this crash-course system.

Tsr says you only posted this like yesterday.... But i swear i remember readimg through all of this weeks ago. All the info on physics the posts all above... This is weird

Apparently there's going to be a review of the structure of the academic year again (after 2008 where the abysmal decision to move to a trimester system with exams in December).

What kind of structure would you like?

The imbalance is ridiculous.

Semester 1 we get our exams within the space of just over a week, and only 3 days of 'revision/consolidation' time between the teaching period ending and the exam period starting.

Semester 2 teaching end, then there's 2 weeks of easter break and 2-4 weeks of revision time before the exams start, and even then they're spread over the period of a whole month.

I think my exam performance would be much better with the January exams.

People often use the argument that now they get to have a break - well I disagree. With January exams, people who want to study throughout the break, and those who don't can just make a self-imposed deadline to have all their studying done before the break begins, and if they don't meet it then that's their fault.

Oh, and just to stir up debate further, how about this:

We had our staff-student committee in our department yesterday where we discussed the review of the academic year structure.

Our lecturers said they felt that 10 weeks per semester was very short and that they were 'force-feeding' us the courses, as well as having to drop elements from the syllabuses. The students also felt that it was too much information in very little time (for example, if you're ill for 1 week then you've missed 10% of the course - and there's no spare weeks to do catch-up work), and that as a result they were just learning stuff 'for the exam' rather than because they wanted to gain the education on offer.

Our lecturers reflected on their university careers when the academic year would begin in October, and the courses were taught throughout the year with only exams in May. They also reflected on what it's like to teach in systems such as that, and found that they could take a much more considered pace that allowed the students to absorb the information in a way that's useful to them, rather in the disposable way that we're forced to do it now.

What would people think of that? One, big, long semester (with all the same breaks, of course!) with exams at the end, and lots of consolidation time?

Aeronautical Engineering is in fact what I do and I don't think I'd dislike the may system. It was 2 aeronautical engineering lecturer who were telling me about it, and they spoke very fondly.

Also, it was at the staff-student committee that this was discussed and the student-staff opinion was surprisingly unanimous - they preferred January exams. It is a research university, but our lecturers are still concerned about providing quality education to our students. Maybe your department sees its research work and its teaching work as separate things. Our undergraduate course is sort of designed to produce researchers, and so the lecturers are somewhat grooming their undergraduates to become the next generation of researchers - it's no wonder they're concerned about the quality of our educations.

I even tried to be devil's advocate in the meeting, throwing in ideas that I thought would get them to speak negatively about January exams - for example, I asked them if there were issues with them marking well into the 2nd semester. They said it wasn't any more a problem than marking December exams.

I know.

That's what's very annoying about it. I only know of the review because I chair the committee.

There should be a student vote on this.

I did get my reps to e-mail their respective classes to ask their opinion.

Aeronautical Engineering is in fact what I do and I don't think I'd dislike the may system. It was 2 aeronautical engineering lecturer who were telling me about it, and they spoke very fondly.

Also, it was at the staff-student committee that this was discussed and the student-staff opinion was surprisingly unanimous - they preferred January exams. It is a research university, but our lecturers are still concerned about providing quality education to our students. Maybe your department sees its research work and its teaching work as separate things. Our undergraduate course is sort of designed to produce researchers, and so the lecturers are somewhat grooming their undergraduates to become the next generation of researchers - it's no wonder they're concerned about the quality of our educations.

I even tried to be devil's advocate in the meeting, throwing in ideas that I thought would get them to speak negatively about January exams - for example, I asked them if there were issues with them marking well into the 2nd semester. They said it wasn't any more a problem than marking December exams.

I'm in 4th year.

3rd has always been known as the year of sorting the men from the boys, even before the 2008 change to december exams. Most of the trouble comes from the 2nd semester, where you have Aero/Fluids, Dyn/Control, Turbo, Flight Mechanics and ASAAD 3, as well as the design project. And since the 2nd semester is very little affected by whether its january or december exams, that aspect of the third year would remain.

The imbalance also means that any errors make the imbalance just TOO much. For example, as Prof. Galbraith was out for an operation earlier this semester, one of our courses got switched to the 2nd semester. This means that this semester I have 20 examinable credits and 2 reports, and next semester, I've got 70 examinable credits, 2 reports, 2 presentations, as well as flight testing - and one of the subject has the highest fail rate in the uni. The imbalance is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

If the system was more balanced, then switching one course wouldn't make much difference as it might be a 70/50 split rather than a 100/20 split.

Isn't that what they always do?

There wasn't any constation when they moved to the trimester system in 2008 either. Total disgrace.

I despise the current principal. Idiot makes 260k a year and graciously took a 4% paycut to help with the funding crisis...

His exams have never been as bad as I thought they'd be.

Although I came out of ASAM3 thinking I'd failed and got an A1, I came out of ASAAD3 thinking I'd got 100%, and got an A2 lol.

Have no idea how he marks :P.

That might actually be beneficial for you. The usual set up is that you get taught fluids in semester 1, aerodynamics in semestser 2, and examined on both in semester 2, which means you have to retain information from a course for 6 months. At least now, for you, the exam and the course are in the same semester.

The first year was the only year when I went into my semester 1 exams fully confident and fully knowledgeable about the subjects. After the switch the time constraints are too much, and most of the time I feel like I'm going into an exam with less knowledge of the course than I would have liked, often relying on the luck of the paper, rather than my expertise in the subject.

P.S. you can thank your lucky stars that Dr. McGookin has taken over Numerical Methods this year. The course had a 60% fail rate last year.

Yes. Even more infuriating is that I know of a story of him getting his P.A. to phone up the person who won the £500 'PhD Student of the Year Award' asking them if they would like to return it to the university as a charitable donation...

Small pocket change to him and his chronies, but a welcome relief for a person who has possibly spent the past 3 years on the breadline.

Yes. Even more infuriating is that I know of a story of him getting his P.A. to phone up the person who won the £500 'PhD Student of the Year Award' asking them if they would like to return it to the university as a charitable donation...

Small pocket change to him and his chronies, but a welcome relief for a person who has possibly spent the past 3 years on the breadline.

I don't think this is true. He uses spreadsheets to mark the exams. If he sees a mistake, he'll remove a mark, change the result on his spreadsheet, and then follow it through.

He realises that some of the calculations in structures are very numerical and, by rights, should be done by computer. So he's not going to penalise you too much for making small numerical errors. As long as your method is correct.



Ah. Fair enough!



We all do, he's brilliant!

P.S. Who are you?

Would I be right in thinking that since the semester 1 teaching period ends on friday the 3rd of december that we don't have any lectures, labs, tutorials etc. after that?

So assuming no exams, we could leave?

yes
though some lecturers might suggest having a lecture in the week commencing the 6th if everyone in the class is OK with it and there's stuff they feel still need taught
happened to me with 2 of my classes last year because they were teaching new courses and thus weren't sure exactly how long it would take to teach the course (I imagine this year they'll have trimmed a few things to keep it inside the teaching period)

I of course abstained from attending as December is busy season in the Bar/Waiting trade and thus is my best time to earn a quick buck

yeah its just I plan to go home for the week before my first exam to get some money, maybe go skiing and stuff so need to make sure I am not going to have a lab or anything.

Thanks for your help.

Also do you know if this sounds right? One of my courses in the catalogue says its assessed on may exam (70%), class test (10%) and coursework (20%) so why would it have an exam in december?

yeah its just I plan to go home for the week before my first exam to get some money, maybe go skiing and stuff so need to make sure I am not going to have a lab or anything.

Thanks for your help.

Also do you know if this sounds right? One of my courses in the catalogue says its assessed on may exam (70%), class test (10%) and coursework (20%) so why would it have an exam in december?