In high school, college was frequently described to me as a lot of reading without much homework. My experiences at Syracuse proved opposite, and college work felt similar to high school, only with fewer tests.

Half way into my semester abroad, I’ve found that description to be much more representative of the British higher education system. Four of my five professors are British and most have made references to teaching their courses as they would at a British university. Despite technically attending Syracuse in London, I’ve found my classes here to be distinctly different.

This is my seventh week of classes, yet I didn’t receive my first grade until today, approximately an hour-and-a-half before I took my first midterm. It’s incredibly difficult to take midterms, be it a paper or a standard test, without knowing my standing in a class or what the professor’s expectations are in grading. I felt confident after the test I took today, but can’t form an expectation for a grade because I don’t know what the professor looks for in writing.

Overall, I like the heightened in-class expectations all my professors seem to have for students. Only two classes have participation grades on the syllabus, but all expect contributions from students on a regular basis.

The increase in passion among both students and teachers leads to a more enriching classroom experience — usually. Four of my five classes meet just once a week for three hours, which can be exhausting, especially when many of us are traveling on a weekly basis and getting far less than our prescribed eight hours of sleep. Here lies the key contradiction at SU London: administrators encourage travel, exploration and even drinking (it’s legal here), yet have high expectations for our ability to work within that schedule.

The staunchest difference from classes in Hall of Languages to classes in Faraday House lies in their attendance policies. Most SU classes that even bother to take attendance, in my experience, allow for an excused absence or two throughout the semester. But a new policy at SU London prevents students from missing a single class — just one absence deducts a third of a letter-grade from your transcript. That is, an A turns into an A-, A- to B+ and so on.

Not only does this fail to account for the normal absences like illness, it ignores the ability to travel that comes with studying in London. Canceled planes, delayed busses or even train strikes (one of which I encountered), are completely out of a student’s hands, yet are not excused by the school. Students are only excused with a doctor’s note or for a preapproved reason. Part of the reason for this is British immigration requirements for attendance, but that has to do with repeated absences, not one or two.

All of this makes it difficult to assess SU London’s true goals for its students. Part of study abroad is being abroad, and part of studying abroad in London is traveling. Those experiences in foreign places are just as large, if not larger, learning experiences than the classes themselves.

Next week is fall break, during which I will visit four countries. Nonetheless, I am expected to turn in two 2,000-word essays and give a presentation before the end of the Wednesday after I return. I certainly won’t be writing in Budapest nor will I be researching after I finish writing this.

But that first grade I got back was an A- after I turned it in with no idea the difficulty with which the professor would grade. The expectations the school as a whole places on us are contradictory, but maybe they’re not as high as I feared.

Jack Rose is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. You can email him at jlrose@syr.edu or follow him @jrose94 on Twitter.

Published on October 21, 2015 at 9:52 pm