There are some great notes on Mathematics taken from a former student at Cambridge (now doing a PhD at Harvard). They are ridiculously good quality and lecturers had to ask Dexter to take down notes a term at a time to ensure students weren't skipping lectures. The notes cover a lot more than what a standard student would do over 3 years undergrad + 1 year graduate (masters).

http://dec41.user.srcf.net/notes

> lecturers had to ask Dexter to take down notes a term at a time to ensure students weren't skipping lectures

This is just... Stupid. Instead of admitting what a poor job you're doing, you're trying to suppress a student, unpaid student, that did a better job than you. (the you is of course the lecturer)

Anecdote: I was a professor of Computer Science from 2004 to 2006, for two years. I was teaching Compilers. I was 25 years old when I started, and Compilers was the worst possible course to teach. I was paid the miserable sum of 1,600 eur per year, which is why the usual "university mafia" wasn't interested in putting someone else in that position (it happened at the end of my second year anyway, when the course was assigned to a full-time professor).

I didn't want my students to pay $150 for the book, as this was Italy in early 2000s and students didn't have a lot of money (probably true today), so I created a big handout book that they could download and print, free of charge, and released it with a Creative Commons license. Or you could order the printed version on Lulu (although, for some reason, this one had to have an "all rights reserved") [0].

Anyway, at some point a professor in the Math department threatened me because students were using my handout to study regular expressions, and it was (in his mind) hurting the sales of the book they were using for his course; that book was of course authored by the professor, and he was making some money from it. How shameful.

Oh, yes: of course I ignored the threats.

[0]: https://www.lulu.com/en/ca/shop/simone-brunozzi/dispense-lab...

> I was paid the miserable sum of 1,600 eur per year, which is why the usual "university mafia" wasn't interested in putting someone else in that position

> Anyway, at some point a professor in the Math department threatened me because students were using my handout to study regular expressions, and it was (in his mind) hurting the sales of the book they were using for his course; that book was of course authored by the professor, and he was making some money from it. How shameful.

It sounds like you missed a potential revenue stream here haha! The fact that the math professor was mad about it meant that you had a potential market!

Also, aren't regex just documented everywhere on the internet? Maybe not in Italian...

Everything is on the internet - it doesn't eliminate the need from students to have a textbook of sorts.

While I have nothing but great things to say about my time at university, I always found it comical how grounded they were in their traditions.

Even under lockdown they refuse to record lectures, forcing the student to make sure they attended their 9am Saturday lecture, or miss the lecture and most definitely not understand any future lectures.

This becomes even more comical when you realise the lecturer is just reciting their own lecture notes and writing out the equations on the blackboard (not whiteboard of course!). However, I will always admire Professor Tim Gowers for teaching an entire Analysis course with no lecture notes and coming up with all of the proofs on the spot.

These are great. I wonder why he didn't just handwrite the notes. These are much better, but they seem like they would take a long time unless you can type latex quickly.

He, infamously, wrote these notes realtime in lectures.

To add, here is an interesting resource on how one might go about doing that using Vim and LaTeX:

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

This is fantastic. Writing notes has always been a bugbear of mine, because 1) my handwriting is terrible and 2) writing notes takes me out of the lecture.

It seems like this is more than fast enough to keep up with the lecture and have something to review properly after the lecture is over.

>> These lec­ture notes — in­clud­ing fig­ures — are made while at­tend­ing the lec­ture and have not been edit­ed af­ter­wards.

This is truly incredible to me.

Oxbridge is very much exam based assessment. With your degree depending only on the exams taken at the end of the final year. So the take-home assessments are there just to make sure that you understand what you're doing and can progress to the next part of the course.

I must say that I am rather glad the degree I did at a Scottish university was based mainly of 4th year exams, with an element of 3rd year exams and coursework.

The idea of a averaging all of your work across your course would have been a disaster for me as I did rather poorly in year 1, scraped through year 2 and did spectacularly well in years 3 and 4.

I'm not sure about Oxford but certainly for Cambridge you aren't graded overall, instead you get a grade for each part of the tripos[1] (two parts).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripos

Yes but you generally treat your degree as being graded by whatever you got in part II

In Oxford, at least for Physics, your grades from every year (except possibly the first) count, but they are heavily weighted towards later years.