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Comment by jvvw | Hacker News Reader

Oxford has no exams in the second year for many subjects (and no tests other than maybe college 'collections' at the start of each term which don't count for anything, but my college didn't even do those for my subject).

Personally I really liked it as it gave me a lot of time to spend trying to really understand my subject without exams and revision hanging over me. It also helped I think that our tutors didn't generally set or mark the exams when we did have them. It did put a lot of pressure on for finals though knowing everything was hanging on how you performed over the course of eight exams in a fortnight.

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Cambridge does this as well and I can't say I was a fan. In mathematics, three years of learning ends up being evaluated through five three-hour exams administered over the course of a week. All it takes is one to fall ill for that week and all of a sudden you don't get a grade. The best case scenario is you can convince the examination board your illness contributed to your performance and they might award you a DDH (Deemed to have Deserved Honours) which no one will really understand.

I went to Oxford, and this actually happened to me. I got ill during exams, and there's no mercy. I sat in the exam halls sweating, unable to breathe properly, trying to hand-compute an analysis of variance calculation. And a bunch of other trivial stuff like singular value decomposition and other linear algebra riddles.

I actually think having one big exam at the end isn't great. There's so much on the line you end up "learning" things too quickly, in a way that's focused on previous exam questions rather than actually learning stuff. And the stuff is actually interesting.

Perhaps a pass/fail system would be better, spread out a bit. The problem with the system is that incremental gains in the exam result are favoured over learning that's hard to quantify.

Yeah this is just the professors being lazy... The grief of having to write more tests and be accountable!

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