Speaking of the British

Re:Speaking of the British by retree on Sunday May 08, 2011 @05:58AM (#2525592)

I think the effect is more significant at Oxbridge though. At Oxbridge you have "supervisions" or "tutorials" as an undergrad. These consist of a 1-on-1 lesson with a fellow or grad student where you are questioned mercilessly on every section of your essay or problem set for an hour. They ask you about every single sentence or step in your solutions. You have to prepare carefully, and even then you have to learn to wing it, because they're going to find flaws you didn't know existed. Given that there is no-one else to back you up or interject with an answer, if you don't learn to wing it quickly, you're screwed.

Oh, and most of this article about Oxbridge is complete crap. I'm working 10 hours a day for 6 days a week in order to prepare for my exams this term at Cambridge, and I'm one of the lighter workers (including English/Classics students). I've never been offered sherry (though I did get some wine at the end of last term), and the interview process is nothing like he described. It's bloody intense. I had 2 interviews and 2 tests in a day and felt like I didn't answer a single question correctly.

As someone else mentioned, if prospective applicants take this article at face value they're in for a nasty shock.

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Re:Speaking of the British by flipbrad on Sunday May 08, 2011 @08:23AM (#2525770)

The author is right to skewer the particular targets of his essay in this way (the so-called Bullingdon set), but please don't take this as a skewer of the Oxbridge system itself, or you risk dramatically underestimating what it demands and delivers. I don't think that's what the author set out to do, and I think he perhaps does in fact colour the bullingdon set's experience of Oxford. I think he's particularly correct to attack how alien the British ruling elite is to scientific principles - uncertainty, testing, evidence, statistics, falsifiability. How fresh it would be to see politicians espouse such principles. This rejection is facilitated by their training in Classics, History or English Literature, and the ego boost one receives from Oxford when one is this particular type of person; typically, they'll be active in the Oxford Union, or be seen down at the Bridge club on a thursday night.

However, don't extrapolate this to a 'normal' undergrad's experience at Oxford.

I've never worked as hard in my life as for my MBiochem finals at Oxford - my law conversion is widely depicted as being intense, but didn't compare.

If the author of that article truly believes oxford tutorials are about defence, he's getting shortchanged, or he's looking to them for exactly the same thing our ruling elite gets from them; either way, he's shortchanging his readers in giving voice to such a view. The true aim of a tutorial is not to spend an hour defending what you wrote two nights ago, it's about letting that stuff fall into the backdrop to a cutting edge discussion with a leading (often foreign) academic; not just getting a better picture of what the cutting edge is, but where it's likely to develop to and what could be investigated over the next few years so we can get there. In UK undergraduate education, my understanding is that this focus on developing questions and probing soft spots in knowledge, rather than just assembling and defending answers, is pretty radical. And it certainly seems to run contrary to a fair amount of the article's claims.

Admittedly most of a tutorial's exchange of ideas flows to the student, but I rarely met a tutor who won't admit to having got something out of tutorials they have given, too.

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