Conclusions

Tutorials should be occasions where the advantages of less-formal interaction with your teachers prevail. They should allow things to happen which can’t happen in lectures. But if you just sit back in tutorials, they’ll probably not be as useful to you as they could be.

Some lecturers are good at making tutorials interactive and interesting - others aren’t! However, it’s very much in your hands. You can do a lot to make sure tutorials are a valuable part of your studies.

Above all, tutorials provide a valuable way for you to find out more about that important question:

“What am I expected to become able to do?”

You can actually ask that question during tutorials. You can probe into the criteria that will be used to measure your progress. You can ask “do we really have to remember all this detail?” You can ask “would a possible exam question take the following sort of form . . . . . . . . . ?”