I have to disagree with you when you say that it involves teaching you what to say to pass the exam. As far as my degree went, that didn’t happen – yes the lecturers did write the exams based on what they knew that we knew, but that is good service in my opinion. They also gave us an enormous amount of coursework, knowing that some of it would not count towards the final grade, but so that we had at least done the work and knew what we were doing. If I didn’t learn what I needed to know, I wouldn’t be able to grasp the next part, and it was up to me to learn it. As for the pass mark for first year being very low – that’s true, but if I had not learnt what I needed to learn in first year and got at least a 2.1 then, I would never have passed second year.

I didn’t feel at all like it was a business – I honestly thought that they had our best interests at heart and that they wanted to actually teach us stuff. And that’s why they run courses on subjects that interest them, that have nothing to do with your degree, but that they teach as a module to one or two students, in their own time, for the sake of the subject.

I do agree with some of your points, but I honestly disagree with it being businesslike. If it had been free I probably wouldn’t have been there – the fact that it was costing me so much money meant I worked as hard as I could to make it worthwhile. But having to pay for it meant that technically you could think of it as business-like, but the learning and the teaching was all about the subject and not about passing exams.