Brian Reay wrote:

Roger Hayter wrote:
snip

Well that's yet another difference. Until the great dumbing-down of
university courses in the UK in recent years,[1] first degrees tended
not to be modular, and the department of the primary subject arranged
lecturers in necessary ancillary subjects as part of the main course.

[1] which doesn't apply to all universities.

A stunningly inaccurate statement. It was possible to take different
modules in top rated Universities (from a selected list) to get a degree 40
years ago. Including Oxbridge.

Things like PPE, or PPP you mean? Whatever the theory, in practice you
couldn't dream up your own combination, there were some established ones



It still is.

True, you couldn't mix, say, engineering and tourism

That of course is what I meant. You couldn't do a Keele style degree of
knitting, Serbo-Croat, media studies and physics. I wasn't trying to
imply that their was no choice of modules in a subject. The point I
was making, of course, that things like computer programming for
chemists, while taught by the subject experts, was part of the Chemistry
degree, not a separately credited module.





but different modules
in engineering (for example) were perfectly normal.

Typically, the first year was fixed but after that you could specialise in,
say, digital electronics and computing or electrical engineering and
electronics.


--

Roger Hayter