Supplementary material

Every student full-time or part-time, who registers for a course at Napier, is a member of the Students’ Association and as such is entitled to participate in its activities and to use its facilities. The students democratically elected by the student body, who have overall responsibility for implementing these policies and for representing the interests of Napier students.

Every class is entitled to elect a class representative to represent its interests to the teaching staff and to the Council of the Students’ Association. Regular newsletters are produced to inform students about what is happening at the Polytechnic and the Association.

The Association funds the activities of many student clubs. These cover a range of social, cultural, political activities. Any student with the support of nine others, can set up a new club and apply for financial assistance from the Association.

The Physical Education Unit is responsible for the operation and development of Sporting Facilities in the Polytechnic. The Unit provides a service of coaching, expert advice, supervision and administrative support for all students of all courses both individually and as members of the various clubs of the Sport Union.

Notes

to be entitled - иметь право на

to elect - выбирать

responsibility - ответственность

to represent - представлять

Find out this information:

a) On what basis are Oxford students selected and why is it said that teaching at Oxford is “pleasantly informal and personal”?

b) What is so dreadful about ‘Finals’?

c) How is the research done by Oxford post-graduates?

OXFORD

What is it like, being a student at Oxford? Like all British universities, Oxford is a state university, not private one. Students are selected on the basis of their results in the national examinations or the special Oxford entrance examination. There are many applicants, and nobody can get a place by paying a fee. Successful candidates are admitted to a specified college of the university: that will be their home for the next three years (the normal period for an undergraduate degree), and for longer if they are admitted to study for a post-graduate degree. They will be mostly taught by tutors from their own college.

Teaching is pleasantly informal and personal; a typical under-graduate (apart from those in the natural sciences who spend all day in the laboratories) will spend an hour a week with his or her ‘tutor’, perhaps in the company of one other student. Each of them will have written an essay for the tutor, which serves as the basis-for discussion, argument, the exposition of ideas and academic methods. At the end of the hour the students go away with new essay title and a list of books that might be helpful in preparing for the essay.

Other kinds of teaching such as lectures and seminars are normally optional: popular lectures can attract audiences from several faculties, while others may find themselves speaking to two or three loyal students or maybe to none at all. So, in theory, if you are good at reading, thinking and writing quickly, you can spend five days out of seven being idle: sleeping, taking part in sports, in student clubs, in acting and singing, in arguing, drinking, having parties. In practice, most students at Oxford are enthusiastic about the academic life, and many of the more conscientious ones work for days at each essay, sometimes sitting up through the night with a wet towel round their heads.

At the end of three years, all students face a dreadful ordeal, ‘Finals’, the final examinations. The victims are obliged to dress up for the occasion in black and white, an old-fashioned ritual that may help to calm the nerves. They crowd into the huge, bleak examination building and sit for three hours writing what they hope is beautiful prose on half-remembered or strangely forgotten subjects. In the afternoon they assemble for another three hours of writing. After four or five days of this torture they emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, and stagger off for the biggest party of them all.

Postgraduates (often just called graduates) are mostly busy with research for their dissertations, and they spend days in their college libraries or in the richly endowed, four-hundred-year-old Bodleian library.