Teaching and Examining at Oxford

The teaching at Oxford combines the standard methods of university education – lectures, classes, and (in the Sciences) laboratory work – with a systematic and intensive use of tutorials. Lectures, classes, and laboratory courses are provided by the University, tutorials by the colleges. A college is thus not just a hall of residence, but a place where social life and learning are combined.

A tutorial is a weekly meeting of one or two students with the tutor to whom they are assigned for their subject. A major proportion of your tutorials will normally be with a tutor who is a member of your own college, though some will be taken by tutors in other colleges who are expert in particular branches of the subject. Most college tutors also hold University lectureships and give lectures open to members of all colleges.

At the weekly meeting with your tutor you present the result of a week’s work, the reading, assembled from the various sources suggested by the tutor the previous week. What you are expected to present is something more than information. Whether it is set out as your solution to a problem, or as a more formal essay, it is essential to develop a critical attitude to facts, to learn to sift evidence, and to establish priorities. This is true of all subjects, of physics no less than of philosophy, or geology, or jurisprudence. Thus a tutorial is a meeting-point of two kinds of critical activity: you learn to be critical in handling data; your tutor analyses and criticizes your efforts. The success of the tutorial method depends upon an attitude of active co-operation between yourself and your tutor: you must risk giving your own opinions and be ready to accept frank criticism and advice given by your tutor. What is at issue is not marks or grades, not even praise or blame, but a joint attempt to make sense of a particular topic. Students do not prepare a single text, or base work on a single textbook. They are free to search out books, and to select from among those they find. They are judged by their critical attitude to what they have discovered. At the heart of the tutorial method is a theory of teaching people to think for themselves.

The University provides an extensive programme of lectures which range in character from survey courses intended to give systematic coverage of a syllabus to (particularly in the later years of a course) critical discussions of limited topics in which the lecturer has special interest and expertise. The main value of a course of lectures often lies as much in the viewpoint that it develops, and the critical method that it exhibits, as in the factual knowledge it conveys. What students get from lectures casts light on their tutorial work, and vice versa. Almost all lectures are open to you as a student, whatever the main subject of your course.

Laboratory courses in the Sciences are compulsory. They are designed to ensure that you become familiar with the main experimental methods in your subject and the critical interpretation of their results, and that you gain some skill in manipulation of scientific equipment.

Finally, the fact that the Oxford term lasts only eight weeks means that each is spent working intensively for tutorials and attending lectures and practical classes. You are expected to undertake during the vacations the wider, more leisurely reading which is essential to all courses. But despite the intensive character of each term’s work, students are able, given a reasonably efficient organization of time and effort, to take full advantage of the opportunities the University offers for other activities – athletic, cultural, and social.

Once at Oxford, students have to pass two examinations, known as the First and Second Public Examinations. The First Public Examination is usually taken during the first year (the exact time varies between subjects), and is in many cases a qualifying (pass/fail) examination, though in some subjects classes are awarded. The Second Public Examination, which is classified and upon which your degree is awarded, follows at least two years later, at the end of the final year.

So our teaching and examining systems reflect our overall aim of providing you with the opportunity not only to gain knowledge, but above all to learn how to think about it. To get the most out of them, you need to be good at and enjoy working and thinking, with guidance certainly, but in an independent and self-reliant way, and in the realms of ideas and arguments as much as facts. Our entrance system reflects this same aim: we are looking for indications of these qualities in you, so that we can see whether you and our approach are well suited to each other.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 916