Academics Part II: Supervisions

Welcome to part two of my academics overview at Cambridge! This time we will be talking about supervisions, the Cambridge version of recitations. Supervisions are an extremelly important part of any module because it is one of the best (and only) times to ask questions about what was discussed in lecture or material on an examples paper. They also serve as useful feedback because they allow you to gauge your understanding of the material, and you can also read your supervisor's comments at the end of term to see how they perceive your understanding.

Before diving into the content of supervisions, let's first discuss logistics. Unlike MIT, who schedules all of the recitations, it is up to you to schedule your supervisions with the supervisor directly. Sometimes, that unfortunately means you end up having supervisions scheduled late into the evening, upwards of 7 pm in some cases or on weekends if there are other scheduling conflicts. In addition, supervisions happen significantly less frequently than recitations do. You will most likely have about four supervisions per module, each of which is mostly dedicated to discussing the previous block of lectures and the current examples paper. For Michaelmas modules, the fourth supervision is scheduled during Lent term so that you can finish up discussing any uncompleted examples paper work and discuss any questions regarding material revised during the Christmas vacation (more on that in a future blogpost!). This is in significant contrast to MIT, where I had at least one recitation a week for each class. Some lecturers even tag-teamed with recitations, with lecturers saying something along the lines of, "I'll briefly discuss this topic, but you'll cover it more in recitation."

Next, let's talk about the supervisors themselves. More often than not, the supervisors will be graduate students. Never will they be undergraduates, and very rarely will they be actual professors. Most recitation leaders are indeed graduate students, but you certainly do see undergraduates and professors leading recitations. Another major difference is that supervisors never come to the lectures. This is in contrast to most recitation leaders, whom you can see at most if not all of the lectures. Supervisors will get copies of the lecture notes though. Since the supervisions happen so infrequently, trying to incorporate discussion about lectures, which can happen during recitations, is often impractical because it would require the supervisor to compress several lectures worth of material in what is generally a one-hour time slot. Thus, the supervisors really have no reason to attend lectures as long as they have the lecture notes and examples papers. This is indeed a very MIT-esque rationale for not attending lectures in many cases. :)

Like recitation leaders at MIT, supervision leaders at Cambridge are generally not too bad, but sometimes, they're not so good or useful either. This observation is a little surprising and even worrisome. We don't have office hours at Cambridge, so supervisions are really the only time during term to ask questions about the material. If supervision leaders are not prepared to answer questions, that really puts a crimp in the learning process I feel. I'm totally fine with being more independent in the learning, but I should be able to get help if I have issues with the material. There were several occasions when the supervisors themselves did not understand the material or struggled to answer questions I was asking. I was not trying to quiz them in any way. I was only trying to get further clarification on certain questions because I could not understand how the answer arrived at particular conclusions. However, to the supervisor's credit, if they are caught off guard, they will do their best to reason out and answer your question to the best of their ability, even if it means sometimes going overtime. Thus, the process does not completely break down. However, given how little time you have for supervisions as a whole, you would rather prefer that those situations do not occur.

So what exactly goes on during supervisions? It almost always involves going over an examples paper (and in the last supervision for my Michaelmas term modules, probably tripos questions as well), where the students get to ask questions both about the problems and about lecture material. One advantage of these supervisions is that they are extremely small (about 2-3 people), so the instruction is quite personal. Thus, you are able to ask a lot of your questions, which can be a failing of office hours or recitations at MIT given their larger sizes. I have experienced multiple times at office hours for example, where there are too many students for one instructor. Thus, the TA or professor has to try to find common questions among students and answer them, spends very little time with each student so he/she can at least partially address as many questions as possible, or spends a good amount of time with each student so he/she can fully address questions, meaning that many students are left with questions unanswered/unasked. In addition, contrary to supervisors at Cambridge, TA's and professor's have much harder time cutoffs i.e. if a recitation or office hours ends at 4 pm, it really does end at 4 pm even if some students could not get their questions answered.

From a cultural perspective, two major differences stand out. First, recitations are more professor/TA-led, while supervisions are more student-led. Recitations often involve the professor/TA presenting further material to teach or reteach the students, which is more passive learning. Supervisions, on the other hand, involve active learning by the students because the learning they get from the supervision is as good as the questions people ask. This seems to be the reverse of lectures, where students are more active (i.e. participate more) at MIT in terms of learning compared to those at Cambridge.

The second major difference is that the balance of student work to supervision/recitation leader work are at opposite ends of the spectrum between MIT and Cambridge. At MIT, recitations are not perceived to be "super vital" for students given how frequently they occur, the fact that they often do not address problem set questions directly (this is often the primary motivation for students in office hours and sometimes in recitations), and the fact that we have other resources (e.g. office hours, other recitations, and maybe tutorials) that can provide aid in the student's learning. We generally do not have to do work to prepare for these recitaitons, and some people even skip them because they are "a waste of time." On the other hand, the recitation leaders do put work into preparing for each recitation, whether it be (re)teaching material or preparing questions for students to answer during the recitation.

At the Cambridge, the reverse is true is for supervisions, which are perceived to quite important (in fact, if you miss any, your DoS, or director of studies, at your college will get on your case to find out why you are missing them) for students. Students are the ones who spend a lot of time preparing answers to the examples papers as well as questions about the material. On the other hand, supervision leaders will try to prepare solutions to the examples papers and/or obtain a copy of the crib (solutions). Now you may think that the work of preparing solutions to the examples papers is comparable to preparing a lesson for a recitation, but remember, the recitation leaders are the same people who will lead office hours regarding the problem sets! Thus, they too have to prepare solutions or at least be familiar with the solutions so they can answer questions then. Consequently, in terms of assisting us with our learning, MIT recitation leaders/TA's invest a lot more time and work, though arguably for lower return than at Cambridge given student turnout for example.

As you can see, neither Cambridge is perfect, but each manages to get its own system to work. I hope that this post helped to illuminate more about the Cambridge supervision system. While I certainly recognize its merits, we shouldn't let them cover up the potential problems you can encounter, and the same is true for MIT! Well, that's it for me regarding supervisions! Look forward to my next post where I tackle examples papers!