Search:

Computer Science University

Hours of contact with tutors

Workload and contact  |  Hours of contact  |  Sizes of teaching groups

This page shows how many hours of contact you are likely to have with your tutor (supervisor, lecturer, practical class assistant, and so on), and also the typical sizes of groups involved in the various forms of teaching. It is not intended to show your likely workload, which is described elsewhere.

It is a general principle of university education that you should learn to work on your own and with others, and should have the encouragement, facilities and freedom to work in that way. Such independence will be more and more in evidence as you progress through the years of the programme, choosing to an ever greater extent to concentrate on topics that particularly interest you.

That means that the number of hours you work in each week will remain the same, while the number of scheduled contact hours might well decrease. The number of unscheduled contact hours - those times when you feel you should call in on your supervisor for advice - which you can do at any time - might, on the other hand, increase.

• The numbers given for the first and second years are reasonably fixed, but those for the third and fourth years are very variable, owing to the freedom that you have to choose among options, and to choose what kind of finals project you will undertake.

• Each student has an individual supervisor, who would normally be a full-time member of the academic staff. You would receive individual supervision at the beginning and end of each term, and at any other time when either you or your supervisor thought it would be beneficial to you. These termly and unscheduled supervisions are not included in the weekly schedule shown above: they would be in addition to the first-year tutorials, and the final-year project supervisions, that are mentioned below.

• The weekly tutorials would be given by your supervisor, who will normally be a full-time member of the academic staff.

• Your weekly finals project supervision would be undertaken either by a full-time member of the academic staff, or by a research associate - that is because it will be closely related to the work of one of our research groups, and the person who knows most about your chosen topic could well be a research associate.

  Years in which you would be working on your finals project have their hours marked with `+'. During project work, you might well call in on your supervisor more frequently, or perhaps your supervisions might last longer than one hour.

• In the fourth year, the teaching schedule is arranged in the same way as for graduate (MSc) teaching: that is, as half-days of lectures, interleaved with half-days of teamwork and problem classes, during some weeks; with other weeks devoted entirely to writing reports for assessment (there are no closed exams in the fourth year). This load has been smoothed out to provide the data in the table here.

• Our research associates contribute not only to the supervision of finals projects but also to the teaching of some third-year options and (especially) fourth-year courses that are related to the research on which they are engaged. Research students, as opposed to associates (who are employed on contracts), are only very rarely involved in teaching; and then because the research they are doing will be of direct benefit to those whom they teach.

• Not every member of academic staff is involved with undergraduate teaching. Of those who are, each typically supervises fourteen undergraduate students: for example, four in each of years 1, 2 and 3, and two in year 4.

How to contact us | Page author Bill Freeman | Page last updated 24 Sep 2007