I am helping someone whose daughter is just beginning a two year’s (or so we thought) master’s degree course at the Royal College of Arts, in London, to put together the application for the needed federal student subsistence grants (Bafög) here in Germany.
One relevant thing (I have to deal with British university administrators filling out German forms :eek: ) is that the term of enrolment is given as beginning of October 2011-end of June 2013, i.e. not a two-year course as previously advertised but 1 year 9 months. To the student’s disadvantage as the monthly grants will be authorised accordingly.
I assume this reflects holidays of 3 months between the last term of the course and the subsequent term.
Is this usual in the UK (i.e. students not being enrolled in the nominal duration of the course’s trailing holidays)?
And: is a student usually free of all obligations in the term holidays? (I recall the usage in Germany being substantially different. A 2n-semester enrolment was October to September, and holidays (at least for us electrical engineering students) meant that we had no lectures, leaving us free to learn for the tests at the middle-to-end of the holidays.) Can a British student expect everything to be wrapped up at the end of the last term?
At the University where I work, students usually only actually attend during the Academic year - Late September through to June. Our full-time Masters courses have attendance September - June, then September to February in the second year.
But you can find ‘Fast-track’ courses which carry on over the summer, in which case a student would attend from September right through to the following August, but these aren’t standard. Academic staff do love their summer holidays, after all.
Yes, the academic year usually ends with exams in June. After that, you are free, barring resits or vivas, and so would not be expected to stay on in the university town, hence no maintenance grant needed. (The degree ceremony takes place in July at most universities, but this varies.)
A student in the UK is usually free of obligations over Christmas and Summer holidays. If the coursework includes a thesis, that may be done over the summer after the end of classwork (this was my case) but the student is not expected to attend classes or stay on campus; campus lodgings weren’t even available over the summer, for us. Advisor help wasn’t available either, but that’s another forum… Since our thesis was optional, we had to decide whether we were going to write one or not: we weren’t considered to be enrolled for the summer until we said we would.
It’s two schoolyears, not two calendar years - not 24 months.