A Different Sort of Education

I was wired right to be a fairly successful student in the U.S.  Sit in class, take notes, read, cram the night before, take a test, and write the occasional paper.  Teachers give you a rubric of the breakdown of how each facet feeds in to a final grade.

I am not sure that I could've done Oxford.  It is as different a way of learning as the sun is from the moon.  They have lectures, but they are voluntary to attend and there is no grading penalty if you miss them.  For your first years as a student, you don't have tests at all.  I know, it sound like a dream, doesn't it.

But things are never as good as they seem.  The system is based on tutorials, which is essentially you sitting down with a professor on a one to one (no more than three to one) basis.  And what do you do?  There's the rub, each week you have to write an 8-10 page paper on an assignment and at the beginning of the tutorial read it aloud to your instructor.  Then your mentor picks it apart and assigns you another one for next week.  If your ego can stand that, the good news is that the grade is not recorded.

The bad news?  At the end of your idyllic stay at Oxford, perhaps being blown to distraction by the esrtwhile winds of youth, there are finally after years of unrecorded grades two weeks or so of exams at the end.  These last three hours each and are essay in format.  You receive a list of questions from which you choose three to show that you have mastered whatever area that test is designed to measure.  They are all or nothing--pass or fail.  You finish those exams and then they celebrate with the Valedictory.

Oh, but wait, you haven't graduated yet.  In fact, the student when they leave Oxford does not even know if they will graduate.  All of those pesky exams are read by multiple readers and a month or so later, you are informed of your degree status (you either have one or you don't).

Talk about pressure!  Talk about easy to screw up by not paying attention in the first couple of years!  Ouch!

I have had my own little taste of this with Dr. Stratford Caldecott who has authored several works on J.R.R. Tolkien.  While a student experiencing the rigors of Oxford may get used to the experience, the reading aloud of the paper is an anguishing exercise.  I prefer writing and then getting comments in writing--the distance makes it much less personal.  Throw in not having written an academic paper in 15 years and you have the recipe for disaster!  Oh, and did I mention that my library card didn't arrive until the day before the paper was due!!  Oh my! (Does my excessive use of exclamation marks demonstrate how uptight I was?!)

But the resulting effect:  I probably worked a lot harder on my paper than I would have otherwise.  Dr. Caldecott was kind in his criticism and even suggested a journal that he felt would be interested in publishing my work.

If the system is designed to produce quality work, it just might scare a student into it.