Does anybody remember my flat auntie from one of my earlier posts? Well one the of the few things that she told me during our brief encounter was that she had only had a 4% (I think she made the exact figure up) attendance rate, and was still achieving a 2:1 in her degree(which is over 60% of marks). I didn't believe what she was telling, she was in the Business School like me, but there was no way, I told myself then, that I would go to so few lectures- god knows I'm getting myself into enough debt here I may as well take full advantage of what I'm paying for!
Here I am almost half way through my second and last teaching period, and my attendance is, shall we say- less than perfect :P The University tell you that all timetabled lectures and tutorials have a mandatory attendance requirement, but there are registration sheets in the first two weeks of each teaching period only, so after it really is left up to your own conscience. Almost all lecture and tutorial materials are available on the ABS virtual learning environment called Blackboard, including powerpoint slides, the answers to set work and past exam papers, so if you can't get to a lecture or choose not to go then there is a way to catch up.
I've found that at university there is a much more of a self-reliance when it comes to learning, unlike my A-levels and GCSEs there is no one to spoon feed me exam responses which I can repeat parrot fashion until I'm blue in the face (I'm not knocking A-Levels and GCSEs I had to work to get my good grades, and some people are lot more demanding than the ones I did!). In some lectures you will only have a lecturer read slides to you, I found if I just read them in my own time I wasn't missing out on much because it was a fairly easy content to learn. In others, like a certain Dr. Patrick Tissington's Organisational Behaviour lectures or the Financial Accounting Module, you really can't afford to miss the lectures. The former because they are an absolute hoot (did I just use the word hoot :P), and the latter because it is riddled with surprise class tests and fill in the blank exercises which you actually need :( With only about 24 hours a fortnight of contact time on the ABS first year timetable (not exactly great value for money some might say :P), a lot of learning takes place outside of the lecture hall, in the middle of the night reading chapters from texts books or reviewing slides and notes online, at least that's how I did it. Important lectures which I always try to attend are the first couple when you are A) being registered and B) getting an introduction and foundation for the module, and also the last revision lectures or tutorials, these are a great time to learn the exam technique for the module and review any bits you might have missed during the term. The rest I will leave to your own judgement.
An important note before I go is on textbooks. I made the mistake of buying all the first teaching periods text books, it cost me £15o and most them I barely looked at and probably wont ever again. I will sell some to recoup costs though :) If you don't want to invest in new copies of set texts then take advantage of second years, like me who will be selling their previous years books at a discounted price. If you can't afford to do either, or just don't want to, then there is a limited supply of text books in the library- don't rely on them being there during exam revision time though, because you have no chance of turning up the night before an exam looking for a text book- some of my friends learnt this the hard way. When I was writing a couple of 2000 word essays less than a week before their due date I remember grabbing the last 4 books in the shelves in that area- and still having to share them with a friend! Talk about close for comfort. Still waiting for those essay marks actually- hope it was all worth it :S
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