Undergraduate courses

How you will be taught will vary according to subject and will consist of a mix of lectures, classes, tutorials, and in the natural sciences, laboratory or practical sessions. In most subjects, tutorials make up the core method of instruction. Each college has subject tutors —usually fellows of the college— who are responsible for organizing undergraduate tutorials and making sure that each student, regardless of educational background, makes satisfactory progress on their course. Your college subject tutor may lecture or tutor you in some modules, but most lectures and tutorials will be given by tutors from other colleges, one or two of whom may even be graduate students.

At eight weeks, the Oxford term is notably short. A lot of reading, essay-writing and attendance at lectures, classes, tutorials and/or labs —not to mention a social life— must be packed in, making it a uniquely intense experience! The workload is more than most students expect, so when you first arrive in Oxford, it may take you a couple of weeks or more to find the best way to manage your time and get everything done. Persevere and you will survive, as we all have! What will also become clear to you almost immediately is that humanities and social students and science students and students studying the sciences have very different experiences at Oxford. Humanities and social science students may seem to have more free time, as they have fewer contact hours with tutors and lecturers, and are expected to organize a lot of their work themselves. Scientists, on the other hand, have to conform to a more rigid timetable composed of morning lectures and afternoon labs. Humanities students will also generally have more freedom in choosing what to study.

The Radcliffe Science Library.So, what is a tutorial? In a nutshell, it is a weekly —or, in some cases, fortnightly— meeting between you and your tutor (who, as we've mentioned might be a fellow of your college, another college or even a graduate student). You will usually have one tutorial for each course you are taking in a term. A typical tutorial consists of a small group of one to three students and lasts for about an hour. For Humanities students each tutorial centres on an essay you will have written, based on a topic and reading list provided by the tutor, and which you will then discuss with your tutor and fellow tutees. If you are the only student in your tutorial, it is obviously more demanding than if there were two or three of you. Having a tutorial partner, with whom you can discuss your ideas, can also be more fun. The key is to not feel threatened or intimidated by your partner, but to see both of you as trying to learn the same things. One-on-one tutorials with a tutor, however, are a unique opportunity to learn directly from —and even challenge!— and expert in your field.

The main difference between a tutorial and a class is that the latter is bigger. A typical class will consist of four to ten students, who are expected to prepare an assignment or presentation for each class. A class is, in general, slightly less demanding and slightly more informal than a tutorial. In addition, because usually not everyone in a given class will be from your college, it can provide a wonderful opportunity to get to know people from different colleges.

Unlike tutorials, lectures are organized by the University through its departments and faculties. They tend not to be compulsory in the humanities, but regardless of the subject, will always be highly recommended. Your tutors will advise you on which ones to attend. How many you attend will depend on your subject and how you manage your workload. Most lectures will give you a broad overview of the subject and an individual topic in it, which can be very valuable when studying for exams. They can also be a useful resource for ideas, help you make sense of reading lists, and sometimes make you see a topic from a perspective that you might not have otherwise considered.

Reading lists accompany almost everything and most of you will have had a good look at one over the summer already. They are, in a word, lengthy. Before you start worrying, bear in mind that you are not expected to read the entire list of titles on a topic in the given week, but certainly in time for exams! In general, you should first read the basic texts on the week's topic. These will usually be specified at the top of the list, and then perhaps, pick a few from the remainder. Your aim should be to read about six or so titles —be they books, book chapters or journal articles— from the list in order to write a good essay, which is what you are doing the reading for in the first instance. Again, it might take a couple of weeks, but the question of what to read and what to ignore will usually resolve itself.

If you are an arts or humanities student writing essays will probably be the hardest thing you will learn to do at Oxford. It is very easy to write a literature review, or a summary of your reading for an essay. But that is not what is typically expected of you at Oxford. What is expected is a good argument —your idea— that you have formed based on your reading, then presenting it clearly, and backing it up with evidence and quotes from your reading; and finally being able to look at your own argument critically and to place it in context. What you don't want to do is to simply cover all the facts, or to report what different authors say and forget to make an argument or write what you think about it all.

The lectures, classes, tutorials and labs are all there to prepare you for your exams. Unlike many other universities, you will not necessarily have to sit exams every year in order to get a degree. However, this is not altogether good news. Exams at Oxford tend to be rare but very important. ‘Prelims’ or ‘Mods’ take place at the end of the first year and ‘Finals’, as the name suggests, come at the end of your last year. Nevertheless, there are some courses (mostly in the sciences and medicine) that have additional exams. Some colleges will require you to sit informal exams called ‘Collections’, though these do not count towards your degree and are mainly used to assess your progress. They are set after vacations and will be based on the work you have done in the previous term.

Exams are marked on a scale from 0 to 100. The pass mark for these varies from subject to subject but generally anything below 40 is considered a fail. Marks from 50 to 59 will get you a lower second class degree (called a ‘2.2’), marks from 60 to 69 an upper second class degree (a ‘2.1’) and anything over 70 will earn you a first class degree (a ‘1’.