[aleksei]

Yes, the university life portrayed in American tv shows is also quite unfamiliar to Nordics.

Your experience mirrors mine in Finland. You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams. No one cared whether you attended the lectures or the exercise sessions, you were simply expected to be able to apply the material by the end of the course.

However it depended heavily on faculty or even field. I think the humanists had to attend many of their lectures, while the exact sciences didn't have such requirements (although the physics department also insisted on handing in exercises; profs probably got tired of grading people trying their luck).

I felt I was lucky for the freedom I was granted, although I too felt I would have liked more face to face teaching for some courses (it also allowed for making poor decisions regarding priorities, though I have no regrets).

I think other students had the same sentiments, and difficult courses began having more free-form sessions in addition to lectures and exercises. I feel this is a pretty good compromise of sorts, as it allows for different styles of learning, and you could even hold a day job while studying, or live out of city etc. as you're not forced to be physically present.

[rootusrootus]

I went to a state university in Oregon...

> You could enrol for a course and only turn up for the exams

And aside from a few exceptions, this is exactly how I approached my studies. I'd show up on day 1, the day of each midterm, and the last day of class before the final exam.

[Spooky23]

I did this as well. I had to take “economic statistics”, as it was discovered late in my senior year that AP Stats couldn’t be used in my major.

I didn’t show up at all, as the class notes were available online and all assignments were online submission (on a VAX, of all things in 1999). When I arrived at the midterm, the professor called the UPD, as he had never seen me before.

[shard]

Back in college there was a class where all exams were take-home, and all homeworks and exams could be deposited in the professor's mailbox. I read the text, did homework with my classmates, passed the exams, and never even found out what the professor looked like.

[Etherea]

There I would factor in the cost of education in Europe and US...

I also did what you did in my years at school and I regret it deeply. Noone would take on welding without being next to an experienced welder, why is this any different with other subjects? I now wish I had been smarter and spent more time with my professors outside of the class to learn by watching them work on problems and work with them.