Exams all year round? What’s up with the differences between UH and UOM

by Chloe Bolton, University of Helsinki, Finland

Okay, so forget everything you’ve learned about exam season over the past two years, and get ready for exam year. Lucky for you, the grades you get here don’t count towards your final degree, so don’t stress, all you need is a pass. Unlucky for me, I’m doing better here than I was in Manchester.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by exam year, allow me to explain. Here the modules don’t run for a whole semester, but rather they function by periods: 2 periods per semester, 4 periods per year. Seems simple right? There’s more.

Courses don’t necessarily run for a whole period, I’ve had certain courses last 8 weeks, but I’ve also had courses that last 4 lectures spread across 2 weeks. This means that you get exams all year round, as courses are starting and ending all the time, rather than all ending at the end of the semester.

In all honesty, it’s not that hard to adapt to but it does sound like a lot, and in all fairness it serves as great practice for exams in third year. I’ve had a plethora of exam types, ranging from closed book exams, to online discussion boards, to group presentations, to learning diaries, to open book timed exams, to 10 page essays, to fully online courses that require 1 essay per week… You truly have it all.

Here courses are 5 ECTS in general, with around 16 hours of lectures, and the rest should be independent study (120 hours). There is something for everyone. Some courses have larger lecture groups, some have a smaller seminar type intake, some are exclusively online, and some are exclusively group-work type lectures. What is nice is that you can stick to what you enjoy or try a bit of everything as registration for courses is year-round rather than at the start of the semester.

Something I was very lucky to try this year was mooting as part of one of my courses. I participated the Telders International Moot Court Competition, which was worth 15 ECTS. This experience was invaluable, I got to go to the ICJ in The Hague, speak in front of some very important people in International Law and meet like minded law students. I would definitely recommend doing something like this with your year abroad because if you were to do it in Manchester it would be on top of your actual curriculum, which is an added workload, whereas Helsinki allows you to Moot instead of taking three basic courses. The university actually attended a variety of Moot Courts so if international law isn’t your thing, you could do EU law, criminal law, arbitration, intellectual property to name a few!