In many aspects university differs greatly from high school; in others it is very similar. In this section I want to give an overview of what you will be up against at university. Later I will get down to details.
The most significant difference between university and high school is the freedom that you have at university. This might seem like a good thing but, as we have seen, it can work against you. For example, since you are free to attend or miss lectures at will, you may be tempted to skip them.
Your classes or lectures will often be very impersonal events. You will sit in a large lecture hall listening to an apparently miniscule professor standing in the distance at the front of the classroom lecturing you on topics that were never covered in high school. Except in rare instances, you will not be missed if absent or acknowledged if present. It will be up to you to decide what is important and what is not. It will be up to you to decide whether or not to study; very few professors give unannounced quizzes in the lecture period.
You alone can decide whether or not to do what’s asked. It will be up to you to decide if you should hand in an assignment. It will be your decision whether to attend a lecture, lab or tutorial. To the lecturer you will be one of hundreds or thousands of uninspiring first-year faces. It will be up to you whether you remain anonymous or get the most out of your years at university.
Your hours in class will vary with the courses you have chosen. In each arts course (English, French, fine arts, etc.) you will have a minimum of two to three hours (depending on the university) of lectures per week. In the sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) you will have the same lecture periods and you will also have to attend laboratory periods which will range from two to four hours per week. Some disciplines, such as mathematics and computer science, also have tutorials that are designed to give the practical aspects of the courses as well as some individual attention. The number of tutorial hours will also vary from university to university.
Typically students are required to take five full courses (or full course equivalents, FCEs) per year for three or four years to be awarded the Bachelor’s degree. By the way, the Bachelor’s degree is rarely discussed in terms of three or four years but instead as to the number of full courses required (e.g., fifteen or twenty FCEs). Nowadays, most students take fewer than five full courses per year, usually averaging three to four courses per year. Also, full courses are less common with half-courses predominating. Thus depending on your chosen curriculum you will have between ten and thirty hours of class time per week. In disciplines that have few class hours, more outside reading and other assignments are usually required, while in the sciences time will be spent preparing for labs and writing lab reports.
Because of the diversity of university programs it would be futile to spend any more time giving generalities about what to expect. However, to succeed at university I believe you should spend about twelve hours of work time per course per week. That means a sixty-hour week, which is longer than a typical workweek. Of course, some students do well with less work and others need more time at the books. Let your grades be your guide. As with anything, the more you work at it, the better things will go. Studying will be covered in more detail in Chapter 5.
Courses and Calendars
One of the most dramatic differences between high school and university is the wide variety of courses available at the postsecondary institution. At a large university you will have literally hundreds of courses to choose from, ranging from anthropology to musicology to zoology. Even small universities will have a large number of disciplines in which you can specialize.
As a result, the most important book you can acquire for sorting through this academic maze is the university calendar. You can write to the universities that interest you and request their calendars, or, more conveniently, you can usually find them as PDF documents on the universities’ websites. Your school library or a local university library also may have calendars you can look at. Don’t select a university until you have visited the universities you are interested in or have checked out their calendars and websites and talked to others who have first-hand knowledge of the institution.
The calendar is your academic bible and complete information guide. It will tell you the high school requirements for each program and explain the minimum number of courses you need to get your degree and the general requirements that have to be met. It will show which courses are required to complete a specific program and how many courses are optional. The calendar is divided into sections for each discipline or area of study. So if you are interested in English or history, for example, you simply use the index to find the section and see what courses are listed. The essential contents of each course are also outlined.
The university calendar also has much other useful information. It will tell you how to register, enrol and withdraw from courses. It will explain how to transfer from one university to another. It will detail the grading scheme for that university and the grading regulations. In addition, it will contain information on all other aspects of your academic progress: transcripts, appeals, academic offences (e.g., cheating) and other valuable data.
If the calendar is complete, it will also give you information about other resources available, such as student housing, library facilities, athletics and student organizations. It lists the names and positions of the academic faculty. Thus it is a valuable reference book when you want to find out whom to see about a specific problem.
Confusion: Courses and Curricula
Although your university calendar will give you details about course requirements in various areas, it will not give the lowdown on what you encounter when you enter the university system. One way to find out how other students rank specific courses and their instructors is to review the results of course evaluations. In most universities, a student group or the university administration itself conducts a student opinion survey each year and publishes the results. You simply look up the course that interests you to learn what the students feel about the instructor(s), the course material and the relative difficulty of the course. Course evaluations are covered in more detail later in this chapter.
A curriculum (plural: curricula) is simply a prescribed course of study, a program of courses in a specific area. The idea behind prescribed programs is to give the student a well-balanced education while making that student something of a specialist in his or her chosen area. For example, if you were a student in English at a university that required twenty full courses for an Honours Bachelor of Arts you would have to take a minimum number of English courses (e.g., eight) to graduate as a specialist in English studies. There would also be an upper limit (e.g., twelve) on the number of English courses that you could take. You would be required to take some courses in other disciplines (e.g., science, math), but the choice would be up to you.
Most university systems divide the academic year (usually eight months—September to April or early May) into the fall and spring terms. Some universities have fall, spring and summer terms, allowing students to pursue their studies all year round, to take different semesters to complete the academic program or to alternate semesters at school and semesters in the workforce. In universities with fall and spring semesters there are usually two types of courses: full-year and half-year or semester courses. Universities with three semesters usually offer only half-year or single-semester courses.
The value of a full-year course is that it allows you to get your teeth into a subject. Many students balk at the amount of work that has to be recalled for the final exams of such courses. However, if you follow the study scheme I describe later you should have no fear about doing well in full-year courses. Half-year courses are valuable in allowing you to taste a smorgasbord of intellectual delights; you can sample many different areas because you can fit two half-year courses into the same period that it takes to do a full-year course. Another advantage is that
