Britpick: University education
Apr. 19th, 2013 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jadesfireOkay, since I'm not actually getting anything useful done for myself today, I figured I should try to do something useful for other people.
As with my last Britpick post, I need to start with a few disclaimers:
- My educational experience was from 1999-2003. Stuff changes, although as I still work for the university, I'm pretty sure students don't.
- My experience is entirely Oxford, which is a huge bias, although I've done my best to be general.
- This is just about first degrees. If I start on Masters and Doctorates, I could write as much again, which I'm happy to do if it's wanted.
- I'm talking very specifically about what happens in England and Wales, sometimes just England. Scottish education is quite different, and I'm not qualified to talk about it, so I don't! As far as I'm aware, Wales broadly has the same system as England, but I'll take corrections, obviously!
- I cannot cover everything. Even slightly. Please ask or point out if I've missed something obvious!
This got rather long, but it covers:
~ Terminology
~ Getting in
~ What you study
~ What you pay
~ University life
~ Oxbridge, Red Bricks and the Russell Group
Terminology
The most common mistake I see is calling university 'school'. In the UK, school is what you attend from the ages of 4 to 16/18. Higher education is called university or uni.
A college is one of two things. In normal contexts, it's somewhere you go after you leave school, either to do your A-levels (see below), or to follow a vocational course for a qualification. You don't get a degree from a college usually.
In the specific contexts of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge or Durham (and possibly others I don't know about - anyone?), a college is a unit within the university. You apply to a college, you are admitted to a college, the college organises your education and often your accommodation. It's somewhere between a fraternity, a hall of residence and a pastoral care system. I don't want to get too bogged down in it, but if you want to know about college life, I can go into more.
Although it's becoming more common, most English and Welsh students don't do 'assignments'. They're more likely to be referred to as coursework or essays.
Importantly, we don't have the term GPA. I've read enough US college fic to have an idea what it is, but it doesn't exist over here. We also don't have fraternities, and so none of the slang that goes with them, and we don't have TAs to help the teaching staff.
Teaching staff are members of faculty, and are not automatically 'Professor' - Professor is something you get by applying for and getting a professorship, which is advertised very much like a job. Usually academics are called 'lecturers' officially, and at Oxford and Cambridge, they're also called Dons.
University email addresses in the UK tend to end ".ac.uk", with a code for the university before that (eg ox.ac.uk for Oxford, cam.ac.uk for Cambridge)
Getting in
I wanted to cover this, because it's something that often gets missed out.
We have to go back a step to get to universities. A couple of steps actually. English and Welsh children take exams around the age of 16 called GCSEs. They then have the choice of doing A-levels or a vocational qualification such as an NVQ. A-levels come in two parts. ASs are taken after one year, normally in 4 or 5 subjects. A2s are taken at the end of the second year, and are normally 3 or 4 subjects. Some science subjects are modular, allowing students to take exams throughout the year, and the totals are added up at the end to give their grades
At the beginning of the second year of their A-levels (exact dates here, as they vary for subjects), students start applying to university. This is done using the UCAS form. That's one form to apply to ALL universities. Oxford and Cambridge, and possibly others, require you to fill out a separate one for them, but you must also have submitted a UCAS form. This is a summary of your education, a statement from your teacher and the dreaded personal statement that is the bane of all students' lives.
Most universities will then just make an offer. This means that they say provided you get certain grades at A-level, they will admit you to take the course you want to do.
Oxford and Cambridge (?and Durham, not sure) require you to apply much earlier, because they still have an interview system. Anyone who gets through the application stage goes to interview in December. I can go into this in more detail having seen it from both sides, but suffice to say it's notoriously gruelling, and can be the basis of lifelong friendships!
Once you have offers from universities, which are usually dependent on your results, you accept one and name a second as an insurance choice. Then you wait for your results.
If you don't get offered a place, or you don't want the place you're offered, you can wait for the Clearing process. This means that after the results are published in August, all the universities who still have vacancies submit them into a huge database. You then ring UCAS with your results and an idea of either the subject you want to do or the place you want to go, and they help you find a match. It's not as bad as it sounds, and I know a lot of people who did much better from it - eg, if you massively exceed your predicted grades, or massively miss them, or even if you didn't apply anywhere because you weren't sure, but change your mind!
If you meet the grades for your first choice, you go there. If you don't, you go to your insurance choice, although many universities will take you even if you miss by a little, as long as you get the right grades in your subject of choice.
Note: England and Wales are currently in the throes of yet another educational reform, with a possible recommendation to move over to a Baccalaureate system. Some independent schools in the UK already offer the International Bacc, but the suggestion is to create a British one instead. It's a whole big thing, and I suggest researching it if your characters are teachers, because all the teachers I know are up in arms about it.
A lot of people take a gap year before starting university, to work or to undertake some kind of voluntary service or just to travel, in which case they either accept a place, then defer entry for a year, or they apply the year after, once they've got their results. Most universities will say whether or not they will let you defer - very popular courses almost certainly won't. Because of travelling or other things they want to do, a lot of people take a gap year, then apply for a place through clearing, to save them having to fill in the UCAS form entirely. There are lots of organisations that help people find things to do with their gap years, for both fun and profit!
What you study
This is a good point to talk about subjects. When you apply to a English or Welsh university, you apply to do one subject. You may do what's called 'joint honours' which is a combination of subjects (english and drama, maths and physics, French and Spanish) but basically, one subject, which you choose at the beginning, apply to do, then study for your 3 or 4 years.
Following on from what I said above, if you're given a 'three A offer' (ie, you have to get 3 As at A2 to get your place) to study English, and you get As in English and French but a C in music, a lot of places will still take you anyway, because you got the right grades for the subject.
There's no such thing as majors and minors in English and Welsh universities. It's just one subject, all the way through.
The only exception to this is the Open University, where you can just do a degree straight through, or you can build up credits towards a degree across a range of subjects, but that's not as common. It takes part-time, pretty much entirely mature students, and is often a way for people who never had the chance to go to university to get a degree.
Degrees are normally 3 years long, unless you have a year abroad, or a 'year out'. If you're studying a language, a year abroad is normally compulsory. If you're studying something that relates to industry (eg engineering, computing), you can sometimes take a year to work for a company to gain experience.
What you pay
If you are writing something set within the last few years, you have to understand that tuition fees are controversial in the UK.
When I started my degree in 1999, they were £1000 a year. Ours was the first year to pay fees, and although it was means tested (ie, people paid according to their means), everyone had to pay something. At the same time, student grants were replaced with student loans. Instead of being given money to pay for your education by the government, the government set up The Student Loans Company, to manage lending students a certain amount each year. This is paid back directly from your salary once you're earning over a certain amount - the figures are all here.
BUT a couple of years ago, the cap on fees was raised hugely, so that the majority of universities are now charging in the region of £9,000 a year. Again, the exact amount is dependent on household income, but everyone has to pay *something*. English students can borrow the cost of their fees from the Student Loans Company, then borrow more to cover (some of) their living costs. Universities will also offer what support they can, but it's not much.
I think what you need to understand is that this is very, very new for British education. There isn't the infrastructure for scholarships and hardship funds, and people don't start a college fund for their children when they're born (although that will probably start now). And yes, there are loans in place to help people, but we're not used to coming out of college with huge debt - a current student on a four year course, borrowing fees and living costs, comes out with a debt of over £50,000. Considering that just 15 years ago, students didn't pay anything, that's a huge change, very very quickly.
University life
Right, that's the depressing bit out of the way.
Student life in England and Wales is not terribly different to the US in some ways. There are lectures to attend and essays to write. The best way to get a feel for what a place is like is to go to the university website and read up about it. Every subject works differently, every university works differently. But there are a few things to bear in mind.
~ Although most universities do have campuses, a lot are also spread across towns and cities, and some have both a main campus and buildings across town. Remember to check, don't just assume everything is all in one place.
~ Education is delivered normally by lectures and classes. Lectures are big (usually), while classes are 5-20 people in a room. The person who takes your class is more likely to be the person who marks your work than your lecturer.
~ Scientists have practicals (lab work), and normally have to complete a certain number of hours of them in order to pass their degree.
~ Students live in halls, not dorms. They normally have a private room - it's quite rare in the UK to be assigned someone to share with by the university. You might share a house, but not a room. After the first year, people normally have to 'live out' in privately rented accommodation. Oh, and remember it's a flatmate, not a roomie :) Even if you're living in a house, people often say 'flatmate' to mean the people they're sharing with, although you hear 'housemate' as well.
~ Depending on your course, your work may be assessed at the end of every term, only at the end of the year, only by exam or in a variety of other methods. Again, research research research assessment for the place you choose.
~ We don't have things like Spring Break. The year is usually divided into 3 terms - Autumn, Spring and Summer. Increasingly universities are going over to a 2 semester system, where there are short breaks in the middle, rather than long ones, but you'd have to check individual universities for details. Especially with tuition fees being what they are now, most people expect to get a job in all of their holidays (not vacations!)
~ Student Unions are often a mainstay of social life - the term can refer to the physical building, usually where the bar is, as well as the Union itself. SUs provide a lot of welfare support and advice to a lot of students. Particularly for Merlin fic, it's worth checking out what the SU does at your chosen university.
~ Student societies. If you can do it, there's a society for it, usually called [name of activity]soc. If you can think it, you can find other people who think it too and possibly want to think it at the same time as you.
~ First years are Freshers for their first term, then they're just first years. People in their last year are sometimes called finalists (ie, taking their Finals) but equally often they're third years/fourth years.
Oxbridge, Red Bricks, the Russell Group and the Polys
Oxbridge means Oxford and Cambridge, which is an acknowledgement that they do things differently to everyone else, but similarly to each other. Red Brick universities originally meant a very specific group of 6 universities (here) but is more generally used now to mean highly-ranked universities that aren't Oxford or Cambridge.
I should also mention Durham at this point, which is generally the third on the list that starts 'Oxford, Cambridge, ...' When people are being nasty about Durham, they might refer to it being full of 'Oxbridge rejects', since it's often people's insurance choice after Oxbridge. As usual in the UK, it's a snob thing. Durham has a collegiate system similar to Oxbridge, and is usually in the top 5 universities in the country.
The Russell Group is not something you'd hear a student refer to unless they're involved in university politics, but it's worth knowing about. It's 24 top universities who have a focus on research and who speak together on some issues.
You also need to know that a lot of cities have 2 universities, Oxford being the prime example. In the 1960s, there was a massive growth in higher education, with Polytechnics being set up to meet the need, often teaching vocational subjects alongside more traditional subjects. In 1992, they were all given the right to become universities, which they did. So Oxford Poly became Oxford Brookes university. In general, these new universities often have a focus on teaching and less-traditional academic subjects. So although in most fields, a degree from Loughborough university wouldn't be very highly regarded, if you're a librarian, it's one of the best you can get, because the faculty and research going on there is superb. Brookes is brilliant for computing and nursing, and for some subjects that it has in common with Oxford, it beats it in the rankings.
The so-called 'New Universities' can usually be differentiated from the 'old university' if there was one, because they have something after the place in their name - Oxford Brookes, Liverpool John Moores, Nottingham Trent etc.
Getting back to Oxbridge, the education structure is different to most universities. Students still have to attend lectures, classes and practicals, but the main method of teaching is a tutorial - 1-3 students only, and it's a very intense way of learning. Terms are only 8 weeks long, have funny names (Michaelmas, Hilary/Lent, Trinity/Easter) and each week has a number (first week to eighth week) with weeks outside of that having similar names, although nought is counted as a number (minus first, noughth etc, then ninth, tenth etc)
The amount of work expected depends on the subject. As a Classicist, I had to produce 2 1500 word essays a week, none of which counted towards my final mark. My friends doing English only had to do 1, although the reading was a lot heavier, and scientists notoriously work harder than arts students, since they have the same amount of work to produce, lectures are essential and they have to do practicals as well.
But the biggest difference is your college life. At Oxbridge, you apply to and are accepted into a college that offers your subject. The best way of thinking of them are like the states within the USA. Each college is independent, but it answers to the university, and things like lectures are organised centrally by departments.
In all honesty, I could write as much as this again about Oxford, but I won't because my fingers are aching. If you want a flavour of what it's like, try Easy There by Sillic, or if there's a demand, I'll write it all out another time :)
As you can tell, this took quite a bit of putting together, and even then, it's not comprehensive. Hopefully the useful links below will get you started on your research, and if in doubt, please just ask either me here or over on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
paperpushers.
I think we'll go back to some slang for the next essay, as hopefully I can get that done in fewer words! And I'm still taking requests if there's anything people want to read.
Useful links:
Department of education
UCAS
Student Loan Company
University rankings table
Ofqal oversee all qualifications in England
The Russell Group
NUS (national union of students)
The Open University
As with my last Britpick post, I need to start with a few disclaimers:
- My educational experience was from 1999-2003. Stuff changes, although as I still work for the university, I'm pretty sure students don't.
- My experience is entirely Oxford, which is a huge bias, although I've done my best to be general.
- This is just about first degrees. If I start on Masters and Doctorates, I could write as much again, which I'm happy to do if it's wanted.
- I'm talking very specifically about what happens in England and Wales, sometimes just England. Scottish education is quite different, and I'm not qualified to talk about it, so I don't! As far as I'm aware, Wales broadly has the same system as England, but I'll take corrections, obviously!
- I cannot cover everything. Even slightly. Please ask or point out if I've missed something obvious!
This got rather long, but it covers:
~ Terminology
~ Getting in
~ What you study
~ What you pay
~ University life
~ Oxbridge, Red Bricks and the Russell Group
Terminology
The most common mistake I see is calling university 'school'. In the UK, school is what you attend from the ages of 4 to 16/18. Higher education is called university or uni.
A college is one of two things. In normal contexts, it's somewhere you go after you leave school, either to do your A-levels (see below), or to follow a vocational course for a qualification. You don't get a degree from a college usually.
In the specific contexts of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge or Durham (and possibly others I don't know about - anyone?), a college is a unit within the university. You apply to a college, you are admitted to a college, the college organises your education and often your accommodation. It's somewhere between a fraternity, a hall of residence and a pastoral care system. I don't want to get too bogged down in it, but if you want to know about college life, I can go into more.
Although it's becoming more common, most English and Welsh students don't do 'assignments'. They're more likely to be referred to as coursework or essays.
Importantly, we don't have the term GPA. I've read enough US college fic to have an idea what it is, but it doesn't exist over here. We also don't have fraternities, and so none of the slang that goes with them, and we don't have TAs to help the teaching staff.
Teaching staff are members of faculty, and are not automatically 'Professor' - Professor is something you get by applying for and getting a professorship, which is advertised very much like a job. Usually academics are called 'lecturers' officially, and at Oxford and Cambridge, they're also called Dons.
University email addresses in the UK tend to end ".ac.uk", with a code for the university before that (eg ox.ac.uk for Oxford, cam.ac.uk for Cambridge)
Getting in
I wanted to cover this, because it's something that often gets missed out.
We have to go back a step to get to universities. A couple of steps actually. English and Welsh children take exams around the age of 16 called GCSEs. They then have the choice of doing A-levels or a vocational qualification such as an NVQ. A-levels come in two parts. ASs are taken after one year, normally in 4 or 5 subjects. A2s are taken at the end of the second year, and are normally 3 or 4 subjects. Some science subjects are modular, allowing students to take exams throughout the year, and the totals are added up at the end to give their grades
At the beginning of the second year of their A-levels (exact dates here, as they vary for subjects), students start applying to university. This is done using the UCAS form. That's one form to apply to ALL universities. Oxford and Cambridge, and possibly others, require you to fill out a separate one for them, but you must also have submitted a UCAS form. This is a summary of your education, a statement from your teacher and the dreaded personal statement that is the bane of all students' lives.
Most universities will then just make an offer. This means that they say provided you get certain grades at A-level, they will admit you to take the course you want to do.
Oxford and Cambridge (?and Durham, not sure) require you to apply much earlier, because they still have an interview system. Anyone who gets through the application stage goes to interview in December. I can go into this in more detail having seen it from both sides, but suffice to say it's notoriously gruelling, and can be the basis of lifelong friendships!
Once you have offers from universities, which are usually dependent on your results, you accept one and name a second as an insurance choice. Then you wait for your results.
If you don't get offered a place, or you don't want the place you're offered, you can wait for the Clearing process. This means that after the results are published in August, all the universities who still have vacancies submit them into a huge database. You then ring UCAS with your results and an idea of either the subject you want to do or the place you want to go, and they help you find a match. It's not as bad as it sounds, and I know a lot of people who did much better from it - eg, if you massively exceed your predicted grades, or massively miss them, or even if you didn't apply anywhere because you weren't sure, but change your mind!
If you meet the grades for your first choice, you go there. If you don't, you go to your insurance choice, although many universities will take you even if you miss by a little, as long as you get the right grades in your subject of choice.
Note: England and Wales are currently in the throes of yet another educational reform, with a possible recommendation to move over to a Baccalaureate system. Some independent schools in the UK already offer the International Bacc, but the suggestion is to create a British one instead. It's a whole big thing, and I suggest researching it if your characters are teachers, because all the teachers I know are up in arms about it.
A lot of people take a gap year before starting university, to work or to undertake some kind of voluntary service or just to travel, in which case they either accept a place, then defer entry for a year, or they apply the year after, once they've got their results. Most universities will say whether or not they will let you defer - very popular courses almost certainly won't. Because of travelling or other things they want to do, a lot of people take a gap year, then apply for a place through clearing, to save them having to fill in the UCAS form entirely. There are lots of organisations that help people find things to do with their gap years, for both fun and profit!
What you study
This is a good point to talk about subjects. When you apply to a English or Welsh university, you apply to do one subject. You may do what's called 'joint honours' which is a combination of subjects (english and drama, maths and physics, French and Spanish) but basically, one subject, which you choose at the beginning, apply to do, then study for your 3 or 4 years.
Following on from what I said above, if you're given a 'three A offer' (ie, you have to get 3 As at A2 to get your place) to study English, and you get As in English and French but a C in music, a lot of places will still take you anyway, because you got the right grades for the subject.
There's no such thing as majors and minors in English and Welsh universities. It's just one subject, all the way through.
The only exception to this is the Open University, where you can just do a degree straight through, or you can build up credits towards a degree across a range of subjects, but that's not as common. It takes part-time, pretty much entirely mature students, and is often a way for people who never had the chance to go to university to get a degree.
Degrees are normally 3 years long, unless you have a year abroad, or a 'year out'. If you're studying a language, a year abroad is normally compulsory. If you're studying something that relates to industry (eg engineering, computing), you can sometimes take a year to work for a company to gain experience.
What you pay
If you are writing something set within the last few years, you have to understand that tuition fees are controversial in the UK.
When I started my degree in 1999, they were £1000 a year. Ours was the first year to pay fees, and although it was means tested (ie, people paid according to their means), everyone had to pay something. At the same time, student grants were replaced with student loans. Instead of being given money to pay for your education by the government, the government set up The Student Loans Company, to manage lending students a certain amount each year. This is paid back directly from your salary once you're earning over a certain amount - the figures are all here.
BUT a couple of years ago, the cap on fees was raised hugely, so that the majority of universities are now charging in the region of £9,000 a year. Again, the exact amount is dependent on household income, but everyone has to pay *something*. English students can borrow the cost of their fees from the Student Loans Company, then borrow more to cover (some of) their living costs. Universities will also offer what support they can, but it's not much.
I think what you need to understand is that this is very, very new for British education. There isn't the infrastructure for scholarships and hardship funds, and people don't start a college fund for their children when they're born (although that will probably start now). And yes, there are loans in place to help people, but we're not used to coming out of college with huge debt - a current student on a four year course, borrowing fees and living costs, comes out with a debt of over £50,000. Considering that just 15 years ago, students didn't pay anything, that's a huge change, very very quickly.
University life
Right, that's the depressing bit out of the way.
Student life in England and Wales is not terribly different to the US in some ways. There are lectures to attend and essays to write. The best way to get a feel for what a place is like is to go to the university website and read up about it. Every subject works differently, every university works differently. But there are a few things to bear in mind.
~ Although most universities do have campuses, a lot are also spread across towns and cities, and some have both a main campus and buildings across town. Remember to check, don't just assume everything is all in one place.
~ Education is delivered normally by lectures and classes. Lectures are big (usually), while classes are 5-20 people in a room. The person who takes your class is more likely to be the person who marks your work than your lecturer.
~ Scientists have practicals (lab work), and normally have to complete a certain number of hours of them in order to pass their degree.
~ Students live in halls, not dorms. They normally have a private room - it's quite rare in the UK to be assigned someone to share with by the university. You might share a house, but not a room. After the first year, people normally have to 'live out' in privately rented accommodation. Oh, and remember it's a flatmate, not a roomie :) Even if you're living in a house, people often say 'flatmate' to mean the people they're sharing with, although you hear 'housemate' as well.
~ Depending on your course, your work may be assessed at the end of every term, only at the end of the year, only by exam or in a variety of other methods. Again, research research research assessment for the place you choose.
~ We don't have things like Spring Break. The year is usually divided into 3 terms - Autumn, Spring and Summer. Increasingly universities are going over to a 2 semester system, where there are short breaks in the middle, rather than long ones, but you'd have to check individual universities for details. Especially with tuition fees being what they are now, most people expect to get a job in all of their holidays (not vacations!)
~ Student Unions are often a mainstay of social life - the term can refer to the physical building, usually where the bar is, as well as the Union itself. SUs provide a lot of welfare support and advice to a lot of students. Particularly for Merlin fic, it's worth checking out what the SU does at your chosen university.
~ Student societies. If you can do it, there's a society for it, usually called [name of activity]soc. If you can think it, you can find other people who think it too and possibly want to think it at the same time as you.
~ First years are Freshers for their first term, then they're just first years. People in their last year are sometimes called finalists (ie, taking their Finals) but equally often they're third years/fourth years.
Oxbridge, Red Bricks, the Russell Group and the Polys
Oxbridge means Oxford and Cambridge, which is an acknowledgement that they do things differently to everyone else, but similarly to each other. Red Brick universities originally meant a very specific group of 6 universities (here) but is more generally used now to mean highly-ranked universities that aren't Oxford or Cambridge.
I should also mention Durham at this point, which is generally the third on the list that starts 'Oxford, Cambridge, ...' When people are being nasty about Durham, they might refer to it being full of 'Oxbridge rejects', since it's often people's insurance choice after Oxbridge. As usual in the UK, it's a snob thing. Durham has a collegiate system similar to Oxbridge, and is usually in the top 5 universities in the country.
The Russell Group is not something you'd hear a student refer to unless they're involved in university politics, but it's worth knowing about. It's 24 top universities who have a focus on research and who speak together on some issues.
You also need to know that a lot of cities have 2 universities, Oxford being the prime example. In the 1960s, there was a massive growth in higher education, with Polytechnics being set up to meet the need, often teaching vocational subjects alongside more traditional subjects. In 1992, they were all given the right to become universities, which they did. So Oxford Poly became Oxford Brookes university. In general, these new universities often have a focus on teaching and less-traditional academic subjects. So although in most fields, a degree from Loughborough university wouldn't be very highly regarded, if you're a librarian, it's one of the best you can get, because the faculty and research going on there is superb. Brookes is brilliant for computing and nursing, and for some subjects that it has in common with Oxford, it beats it in the rankings.
The so-called 'New Universities' can usually be differentiated from the 'old university' if there was one, because they have something after the place in their name - Oxford Brookes, Liverpool John Moores, Nottingham Trent etc.
Getting back to Oxbridge, the education structure is different to most universities. Students still have to attend lectures, classes and practicals, but the main method of teaching is a tutorial - 1-3 students only, and it's a very intense way of learning. Terms are only 8 weeks long, have funny names (Michaelmas, Hilary/Lent, Trinity/Easter) and each week has a number (first week to eighth week) with weeks outside of that having similar names, although nought is counted as a number (minus first, noughth etc, then ninth, tenth etc)
The amount of work expected depends on the subject. As a Classicist, I had to produce 2 1500 word essays a week, none of which counted towards my final mark. My friends doing English only had to do 1, although the reading was a lot heavier, and scientists notoriously work harder than arts students, since they have the same amount of work to produce, lectures are essential and they have to do practicals as well.
But the biggest difference is your college life. At Oxbridge, you apply to and are accepted into a college that offers your subject. The best way of thinking of them are like the states within the USA. Each college is independent, but it answers to the university, and things like lectures are organised centrally by departments.
In all honesty, I could write as much as this again about Oxford, but I won't because my fingers are aching. If you want a flavour of what it's like, try Easy There by Sillic, or if there's a demand, I'll write it all out another time :)
As you can tell, this took quite a bit of putting together, and even then, it's not comprehensive. Hopefully the useful links below will get you started on your research, and if in doubt, please just ask either me here or over on
paperpushers.I think we'll go back to some slang for the next essay, as hopefully I can get that done in fewer words! And I'm still taking requests if there's anything people want to read.
Useful links:
Department of education
UCAS
Student Loan Company
University rankings table
Ofqal oversee all qualifications in England
The Russell Group
NUS (national union of students)
The Open University
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-20 05:28 am (UTC)Also, Dutch universities have very little in the way of admission requirements. Specific courses (like medicine) excepted, everyone is accepted initially. Of course you do then have the obligation to get more than half of your first year credits *in* your actual first year or still be advised to leave.
And of course the Dutch education system is different again from the UK one. Would anyone care if I expanded on that?
XWA
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 03:00 pm (UTC)I'm interested, since I'm generally interested in everything ;) Do you guys use the IB?