Lectures end in April??

[HannibalLecture]

My DC says lectures finish at the end of April. Russell Group uni, Politics degree. No end of year exams.
Is this the norm for most unis?
What with the tuition fees we pay I'm feeling a tad short-changed!

What else could the academics do? Modules especially maths modules are hundreds of years of knowledge. You don't even need to prepare the lectures.

Of course lectures need to be prepared!

• Academics will also be teaching on multiple modules across multiple programmes.
• There is also the admin that goes with teaching and this is even higher if you are a module and/or course leader.
• There is marking, moderation and exam boards.
• Supervision of students completing dissertations at both UG and PG level
• Supervision of PhD students
• Participation in committees and meetings which contribute to the effective running of the faculty and the university.
• Pastoral support for students
• Some will have leadership responsibilities such as Head of Department, Subject lead, research lead etc and may line manage other staff
• Admissions and recruitment activity
• Research

The actual teaching is a really small part of the job!!

I'm familiar with all of this since I'm also in the field of macadamia. I don’t know much about the history of Cambridge maths. For the engineering course I am working on, it used to consist of 8 modules per year, each worth 15 credits, with 4 contact hours per week. We then switched to 6 modules per year, each worth 20 credits, but kept the same 4 contact hours. The teaching is limited to two days for FT and one day for PT. This change feels like a dilution of the courses. UK universities only offer 3-year programmes, so how do we compete with most universities in other countries, where degrees are typically 4 years? Don't forget that their contact hours are much longer than UK.

@DEI2025 you work in academia yet you're questioning what else an academic might do outside of delivering lectures? Really?

UK universities only offer 3-year programmes

Not true.
However, if you are only referring to 3 year bachelor's degrees and ignoring the rest then you're incorrect if you think that a 3 year degree is of lower value than a 4 year degree studied outside of the UK.

Countries that offer a 4 year programme of standard tend to include a year where students study a broad range of subjects before specialising. In the UK our L3 qualifications prepare students for HE so students are able to move to a degree programme without a more generic first year ( it is different in Scotland).

This doesn’t need to be a teachers vs lecturers battle. They are different jobs I’m an academic but only 20% of my time is teaching. All summer I’m in the lab working on million pound grants in the field of cancer research. If you want people like me teaching your DC then we can’t do it year round. Of course you might not want this, you might want year round teaching from slightly more knowledgable a level teachers. Some unis might offer this in the future.

The OP did say it was a Russell Group uni so, by definition, the lecturers are research academics first and lecturers second.

@SerenityNowSerenityNow
The actual teaching is a really small part of the job!!

And this is exactly the problem with student fees. Students are subsidising the research and other work done at the universities. Even when academics are successful in bidding for central research funding, this doesn't cover 100% of the cost.

There should be much greater transparency around funding of universities: who is paying for what.

Academics think they're underpaid and overworked; students think they're paying too much for what they're getting. Foreign students are subsidising home students; humanities students are subsidising STEM students; students are subsidising research. Graduates resent the on-going cost of repaying the fees.

The whole system is an unstable mess.

@bge I empathise with your position, but sadly, not all students are receiving tuition and input from world leading researchers, even if the departments are headed by such people. In many cases (including marking), it's passed off to very poorly paid post-docs or PhD students (who, whilst knowledgeable, have less training in teaching than the A level teacher you cite). In one university I am familiar with, once a lecturer is promoted to professor, their contact hours drop from 300/year to 100/year, a significant loss in expertise available to students.

At Oxbridge, professors get a 3 month sabbatical on full pay every 2 years to go off and do their own thing with no teaching/supervisions and no requirement to produce anything. And they only have 24 weeks of possible teaching/lecturing anyway.

Unlike any other sector I can think of, there is huge variability between institutions in what the students are offered and what the lecturers/academics are required to do. And yet students pay the same fees.

Plus, of course, students are often paying 12 months rent when they only need to be there for 6-8 months. This represents a massive waste of money - money that often rolls up as student debt which the taxpayer will, in due course, write off.

In fairness, I'm on an education contract in a RG uni, so 60% teaching, 20% scholarship, 20% endless fucking admin.

Bloody good in the classroom though, if I do say so myself. Also, as someone teaching a mathematical subject, the idea that my lectures don't need to be prepared or updated (@DEI2025 are you familiar with terms like AI, data science, analystics? They're all maths.) is enough to make me want to weep into my post lecture, pre marking coffee.

@BarbaraHoward I taught the Data Analytics module. I hadn’t realised before that even at Cambridge, the contact hours are so limited. Fortunately, students aren’t required to pay for accommodation outside of the teaching period. Maybe, they could have a one-year intensive course rather than three years.

Truly, students are not subsidising research! Every UK university makes a loss on domestic undergraduate teaching as the cost of educating a student is more than the fee income.

Oxbridge Professors are entitled to research leave, not “sabbatical” and there is a requirement to produce research during it, ie to write a book or a series of articles. They can’t just go off on a world cruise or take up gardening. Doing research is a requirement of their contracts just as for many academics and will be regularly assessed at their reviews (plus it is a public benefit). Also their workload is not 24 weeks a year - that is just the core undergrad contact period, during which time the students get a vast amount of time, attention, feedback, and pastoral care. As with other universities, there is marking and admin well beyond that and graduate students to supervise all year round.

Incidentally Oxbridge massively subsidises its students from the colleges’ endowment - £9k doesn’t even cover half the cost of educating a student there, so the suggestion that Oxbridge dons are taking the piss is particularly ill informed.

Is this the norm for most unis?

No.
DD did a STEM degree. More contact hours. Lectures until May and exams in May and June.

It's no wonder that STEM degrees are often perceived as being more rigorous

I suspect the end date relates to Easter. We finish in March this year I think, but we start earlier than most. As I said, no Easter break this year.

The number of teaching weeks is usually the same regardless of the course, but the contact hours will differ depending on whether students need to be in the lab or the library.

OP's DD won't be finished in April, she'll have plenty of assessments to do no doubt. But lots of humanities type subjects do use essays rather than exams (based on my limited experience of essays, I'd say they're more work for both student and academic than an exam tbh).

I'd say they're more work for both student and academic than an exam tbh)

I would agree from an academic perspective. Individual feedback is required for essays as opposed to cohort feedback for exams.

In my experience there isn’t a requirement to produce research during sabbaticals (and they are called this colloquially and on the university website). I have friends at both universities who have explained this to me - as I was as surprised as you seem to be. It may vary from dept to dept but management is very very hands off. I accept that you seem to have a different experience.

I have also been told by colleagues at London universities that fee income subsidises their labs and research (obv they have a high % of overseas fees in the mix). They are not happy that their govt research grants don’t fully cover the cost and therefore this cross-subsidisation is necessary.

I didn’t say they were “taking the piss” either. I have huge admiration for academics in these universities, but I don’t think the current funding model is working for any of the stakeholders and the lack of transparency doesn’t help.

DS had this and then one "revision lecture" in summer term and then just exams.