The Teaching System

Teaching responsibilities are divided between the Faculty and the colleges. The Faculty devises the courses, sets the examinations and provides lectures to cover course content. These lectures are available to everyone, on an annual cycle. The colleges arrange supervisions for the courses; these are weekly one-hour discussions for which each student writes an essay. There are also group discussions in Faculty and college classes.

There are four major strengths of this system. One is the course's great flexibility, covered in the section, 'The History course'. The others are:

• The individual attention that undergraduates receive. Supervisions are arranged by the college Director of Studies in History. He or she is a History undergraduate's most important contact, and will assign to each of them a specialist supervisor for each paper. In nearly all cases, undergraduates have supervisions for one paper in each term, and so change supervisors each term. Supervisions take place weekly, usually on a one-to-one or one-to-two basis. They offer teaching that is very flexibly suited to individual needs and closely monitored by the college.
• The intensity of study. The greatest difference between studying History at Cambridge and at many other universities is the amount of written work that is expected of undergraduates. Each week in term, supervisors set a booklist and essay title. The discipline of researching and writing a cogently-argued essay each week is an opportunity and a challenge: an opportunity because it rapidly develops skills of argument, criticism and presentation; a challenge because it requires considerable motivation and the ability to work on one's own.
• The quality and range of teaching on offer. In the first two years, it is possible to study any period of European history from the Greeks to the present, any period of British history from the end of the Roman occupation, American history and other aspects of extra-European history since 1600, and the history of political thought from Plato to Marx. In the third year, it is possible to choose from well over thirty specialised options from within these same time-spans, and to write a dissertation.

The reason for this great range is the size and variety of the teaching element within the Faculty. There are over fifty permanent lecturing staff in the Faculty, but they are only part of the Faculty's strength at any one time, which will include many college teaching and research Fellows and several notable visiting scholars from abroad. A list of Faculty and college lecturing staff is included in this guide. The Faculty has an internationally distinguished reputation for research; it has been awarded the highest possible ratings in all the Research Assessment Exercises conducted to date by university funding bodies. It also possesses an 'Excellent' rating for its teaching, awarded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England's Quality Assessment team. All Faculty staff teach undergraduates, and the purpose of the many classes and seminars organised in and around the Faculty is to allow students to engage in discussion with senior historians as intellectual equals.