The Obligatory I' m Done Thread!

Congrats and well done...

 

Hi,

To answer your questions:

1. Defering exams: You can defer any or all of your exams. As an open learning student deferring is entirely at your discretion. I never did it but I know people who have and it's no problem.

2. Exam length and format depends on the course. In general assessment is by means of a written assignment (30% of your final mark) and an exam (70%). You must pass both. The exam is 2 hours, essay questions, answer 3 out of 6.

3. Past exams: Let me see if I have any saved. I will check and get back to you.

4. I will think about what I can add, but right now it's been a looooong week.

 

Hi novemberdude

It is nice to read through your posting and your successful journey on both LLB and LLM.

I am now thinking of either getting a LLB degree from either Northumbria or London U (External).

As far as my concern, it has little information regarding to the LLB - Northumbria, at least in my home country. I know no one tried this programme before. No supporting tutorial is offered for this program.
- what kind of supports you have received after you registered (do they offer online video class)?
- Does all those study guide / online material sufficient to pass the degree?
- Do you study all by yourself or you attend the external tutorial services?
- How would you compare this programme to the London U External one?

Lots of questions and hope you will can help to answer those. Thanks


Regards
Bundan

 

Congrats for your achievements!

 

Obligatory Congrats!

Congrats! I will opine for the same obligatory congrats in a few months when I finish my MEd...

Way to go. I seriously considered one of Northumbria's programs relating to health law a few years ago. Life, as it's been said, is a strange sort of fiction...so I went an entirely different way.

 

Hi Bundan,

I am more than happy to help with any information. My comments apply to the LLB only as that is the program I gather that you're enquiring about.

1- In terms of supprt there is good passive support from the school. What I mean by this is that they won't be chasing you but if you ask them they will be there for you. The things that you get from the school are a study guide (accessed via the elearning portal) faculty contacts for all your modules, a study schedule, and recommendation on text books. You have to buy the texts. The school has expanded heavily into offering online lectures. This went from virtually nil at the start of the program to some video lectures and lots of powerpoints with audio by the time I finished. I would expect that a lot is being made available. The school is pretty committed to online learning and their distance law programs.

2- Is the study guide/online materials sufficient to pass the course: I'm not sure as I was aiming for better than a bare pass. I suppose you may be able to get by with just those materials, I'm not sure. Realistically you should expect to buy a text on top of the study guide. You can mostly get them used on ebay or other sites. Also there is a wide array of additional study books offered, some of these are helpful and most are not expensive. I can give suggestions in this area as I tried a lot of them. Also note that you have online library access which is helfpul when doing assignments.

The brief answer here is this:

1- The study materials provided are generally good
2- I would expect to have to supplement them with a proper text
3- Buiying an additional study book (ie Nutshells) is not a bad idea

3- Tutorial service or self study: I attended study weeks at the school. These are, as I understand, no longer offered. Other than that I studied "by myself". as I understand it most distance learning students study with only support from the University. Note that for the LLM I studied independently with support only from the school, which went very well.

While the answer to this is personal in the sense that it depends on your learning style I overall believe that the support offered by the university is sufficient and that external tutorial is not required. Many students do very well studying on their own.

4- There are pros and cons in terms of Northumbria compared to University of London External. The things I like about Northumbria are the fact that you are truly a part of the school, you deal directly faculty when you have a question (and they are in general very responsive and helpful) and that you can readily get feedback on written work from actual faculty. On the other hand Northumbria doesn't have a reputation that extends beyond Newcastle. University of London, on the other hand, has great name recognition. The downside with London is no support from the school, very difficult grading scheme, very impersonal and slow administratively.

I also like the fact that I can now turn to faculty members at Northumbria for academic letters of reference rather than having to rely on references from an external tutorial service.

Overall I was very pleased with Northumbria and would choose it again for the LLB (and LLM for that matter). Please let me know if you have any other queries.

 

Hi novemberdude,

Do you have any Northumbria LLB exams and model answers you can share with us? I would like to get a feel of the type of questions as comparing to the US Bar exams.

Thanks

 

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this, I realize that I have owed you a reply for some time.

I had hoped to be able to send you a couple complete exams by email, however that is not possible as I checked immediately after your last post (again, sorry for the delay) and my elearning portal access had just been discontinued. What I am sure I have are a few sample questions that I can send you. I would have to check but I also may have some complete exams in hard copy that I could scan and email to you. Please PM me an email address and I will get to work on this over the next week.