[Silhouette]

University education isn't about the destination/exam it's about the journey.

There are more paths to the final destination than just turning up to all of your lectures, particularly if a lecturer is not doing a good job of presenting the material.

One of the controversial issues here in the UK at the moment is how much students are now paying for their university fees compared to how much value the university offers in return. Governments over the past generation or so have turned undergraduate degrees into a much more commercial proposition: you're taking on a lot of debt, but you're leaving with (in theory, according to the marketing brochure) much better career prospects.

At the same time, advances in technology and communications are rendering obsolete the old school lectures where you turn up and transfer the lecturer's notes from their paper to yours without passing through either brain along the way. You can find some of the best presentations of subjects ever given in freely available videos online today. Manually transcribing notes (or typing them on your laptop, or whatever) is largely a waste of time when you can just download well-written notes and spend your time in a lecture actually concentrating on understanding the material. For many courses, you really need to look at multiple sources anyway, to avoid getting tied up with a single view of the subject or a single expert's personal style of presentation and notation.

So if you said to a typical UK undergraduate today that the most important thing about their university journey was to attend all of their lectures, even when they're being phoned in by some researcher who is simultaneously daydreaming about their latest funding application, I don't think many people would agree with you.