I started writing this article in a lecture theatre. I belatedly realised that the lecture I was sitting in was not relevant to any of the questions on my supervision guide and, faced with the copious deadlines of most Cambridge students, I decided that it was time for me to start getting ahead of the tasks I had lined up for the week. This made me wonder: where complaints of having too much to do in our very short terms are so widespread, is it even worth attending lectures?

During times of stress and heavy workload, lectures are the first thing I give up. As my course is primarily taught through supervision essays, I turn to prioritising a deeper understanding of supervisor-assigned topics through designated readings. When looking for guidance on a particularly challenging text, or if I have missed a lecture on a relevant essay topic, I turn to Pantopo to watch lecture recordings at 1.5x or even 2x speed.

For HSPS students, it seems like lectures aren’t completely vital. A second-year HSPSer at St Edmund’s concurs, claiming that “as someone who understands things through reading rather than through auditory methods, lectures are a fundamental waste of time for me. This is especially so given how far we travel for lectures, how they sometimes go off-topic, and lecturers’ individual styles.” They continued, “It’s nonsensical that faculties choose to restrict lecture recordings on the basis of encouraging attendance […] [it is a] parochial and outdated view that needs to stop.”

“as someone who understands things through reading rather than through auditory methods, lectures are a fundamental waste of time for me.”

In the past, complaints have been filed against the university’s decision to make lecture recording non-mandatory, citing difficulties for students with disability, illness, and those who have English as a second Language, or who need to re-watch recordings to enhance their understanding of course content. For Economics students, pressures to attend in-person lectures are increased, as recordings are only released at the end of term. First-year Trinity economist Arabella Greenwood said, “Lecture content directly feeds into supervision content, so it’s helpful to have the information on hand.” Additionally, because “lectures expand on the information in the PowerPoints, you gain more from being there in person than going through the handout alone.”

Other students who have a strong commitment to attending lectures include language students, who are not only supervised, but attend interactive seminars, classes, and are partly assessed through an oral examination at the end of the year. A first-year HisPol student who had recently swapped into AMES shares how his appreciation for lectures has changed with his degree. While taking history, he found that “while I enjoyed the content in HisPol, I didn’t think that going to lectures was necessary to grasp [the] content, as lectures supplemented supervision readings. Hence, If I felt like I was secure on a topic, going to the lecture was less of a priority.” However, in AMES, “lectures are a primary rather than secondary source of learning, and going to them feels more important if I’m going to grasp the content and contribute to my seminars.”

At the other end of the spectrum, however, stand Medicine, NatScis, and English students. Although STEM and vocational subjects are known for demanding lecture hours, the sheer amount of work, problem sets, and contact hours often take precedence over lecture attendance. Thomas Thomson, a first-year Medic at Christ's, said “Out of all our contact hours in medicine, practically everything bar lectures are mandatory. This naturally leaves lectures with a lower priority of attendance, especially after a long day.” Even so, he still recognises the importance of attending lectures, as “lectures can provide an opportunity to see textbook results or anatomy prior to seeing the unexpected variation in the lab.”

“out of all our contact hours in medicine, practically everything bar lectures are mandatory.”

A second-year physics NatSci added “self-studying is more efficient and useful,” as “lectures are more like a framework for what we are learning, with the rest [of our degree] more about what we learn after lectures.” Nevertheless, she still chooses to attend lectures, saying “I don’t have enough motivation to self-study, so going to lectures that I can learn from is quite important to keep me on track.” This is a sentiment shared by Arabella, who attends lectures “for the discipline of it; if I started missing them, I know it would be a slippery slope for me and I’d start missing all of them and waking up at midday.”

English students take the cake for placing the least value on lecture attendance. Salma Reda, a first-year Trinity English student, said, “Supervisions are the primary mode of learning for English; lectures aren’t useful because they don’t align with the timeline of teaching in a course like English, which is very decentralised.” Because Directors of Studies at different colleges independently assign texts to be studied by their English students, “there is no guarantee that there would’ve been a lecture on the text we’re assigned; if the lecture is not on the assigned text, I’d rather spend my time working on my essays.” A first-year English student at Johns further adds that English lectures are “either context or theory that can basically be found in books, and are never really relevant to our essays.”

And what might lecturers have to say? Dr Paola Filippucci, HSPS DoS and Senior Lecturer at Murray Edwards highlights that lectures “build the social context around learning and the experience of learning as something done with others and through others rather than some lonely pursuit.” For Dr Filippucci, “Learning [for both students and lecturers] is and has to be a social activity where people put their heads together and generate many more interesting ideas by confronting themselves with others and develop their thinking through comparison, confrontation, curiosity towards others’ ideas, and perspectives.” 

She added, “Cambridge lectures are intended to give you [students] a broader context for the readings and questions in supervisions. They also give you the lecturer’s own critical perspective on a field: they communicate the lecturer’s reflections on and understanding of the field based on their research expertise, which transmits not just information, but the lecturer’s unique knowledge.” She argued that the benefit of attending university was that “people learn in a social and collective environment; relying solely on online content impoverishes the student’s learning experience, removing an important dimension from learning, the thing that makes it a very human pursuit.”

While lectures can end up being quite enjoyable, becoming a social event in which I get to see my coursemates after long days of work, many argue that attending lectures is not worth the amount of catch-up and all-nighters needed to finish pending essays and problem sheets. Ultimately, debates surrounding the importance of lecture attendance will always fall back onto the perennial struggle of any Cambridge student, regardless of degree: our sheer amount of assigned work and a perpetual shortage of time.

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