The undergraduate experience has many dimensions, including exceptional opportunities for personal growth, cultural dialogue, travel, getting to grips with an academic discipline and the possibility of original, personal, in-depth investigation of topics which fascinate you. However, there will also be moments of reckoning — pieces of work which will contribute to your degree. Your overall degree classification will depend on them.
At one time, assessment was purely by means of a series of around ten 3-hour exams, often taken at the very end of the 3-year course. Today, assessment is very diverse. Exams still rule the roost at traditional universities like Oxford and Cambridge, but elsewhere many innovative patterns of assessment have emerged. Some enable the source base of a subject to be expanded to include, to take a single example, images of various kinds. Others have been developed to meet the ‘transferrable skills’ agenda — that is, the development of skills deemed to be valuable at work and in broader life situations. These include compiling and delivering presentations, group work and verbal skills of argument and engagement in discussion and dialogue.
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