Interesting Links for 01-04-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Alarms, overdoses and saving lives: 48 hours in UK's first drug injection room

(tags:uk drugs safety scotland )

2. "What Trans Day of Visibility means to me"

(tags:LGBT transgender )

3. Labour congratulated on class April Fool's ruse after announcing plan to implement genuinely left-wing policy

(tags:Labour AprilFool satire politics UK )

4. Buses in Wales to be brought under public control

(tags:buses wales )

5. The 1 bedroom Edinburgh flat with over a thousand businesses registered at it.

(tags:business fraud scotland edinburgh )

6. The Style Returns: Some legal notes on ChatGPT and Studio Ghibli

(tags:law copyright ghibli art ai )

7. "At 52, I learned the truth about my confident Oxbridge colleagues - they're bluffing"

(tags:Education confidence advice )

Comments

[andrewducker]

That's a shame. You'd hope that they'd also teach you about physics!

[beckyc]

While there are some exceptions (yay for certain supportive tutors), I rather suspect that teaching goes against centuries of tradition, as do such things as syllabuses and setting exams based on the contents of lectures or reading material.

It was a real shock when I did an OU degree that the exams were based on the textbooks and VHS content provided. Such a novelty!

[bens_dad]

syllabuses and setting exams based on the contents of lectures or reading material.
You may have this the wrong way round.

As a member of the support staff with a relevant PhD in a Cambridge dept., my observations were that the whole department (or in more than one case, a group of departments) wrote a syllabus with specified topics and what was to be covered in each topic, then the exams were set to that.
Lecturers then gave lectures on a topic (some topics had two complete sets of lectures by different lecturers*).
If the lectures and the exams did not match, the fault was in the lectures (not that that helps the students - unless they read the syllabus and it had sufficient detail).

Unusually there was not an exam for each topic, but something more like a question on each topic on each paper.

*Strictly speaking, one set was on about 80% of a topic, making the course easier but incomplete.

The students also had tutorials or supervisions, but those were run by the colleges so I know almost nothing about them. They may have been based on homework given by the lecturers, but tutors may have had a free hand ...

[beckyc]

Thank you for the informative reply to a silly and flippant comment ! It’s good to hear about the processes and the similarities and differences (alas if I’d been better at paying attention to those as a student I may have done better, especially around cause and effect :).)