Academic Disciplines As Sub-Cultures : The Need To Adapt

The advantage of graduating with an Honours degree is that it enables you, if you have gained either a First Class or Upper Secon d Honours, to continue to postgraduate studies.(There are other routes to postgraduate degrees in some universities, but an Honours undergraduate degree is both the moat common and the preferred training).

Only a few selected students complete an Honours programme; for example at our university there may be 350 students in the first-year Political Science course and only ten students will continue to complete their fourth-year Honours course. Of those ten Honours students, probably only four will continue to a Master's degree and maybe two of these will finally enroll for the PhD degree. But the Honours sub-thesis is the first formal step towards ind ependent academic research.

 Conclusion

In this chapter we have outlined for you the main features of the secondary school and undergraduate education of a typical student in Australia. We have not made direct comparisons with education ­systems in Asia or other parts of the world. For one thing, there are too many variations for such comparisons to be useful. Beside, you yourself know far better than anyone else how your own experience can be compared with the Australian system as we have explained it.

The one aspect we have stressed in all this explanation , necessity for adjustment. Each level of education and each discipline makes different demands. The adjustments you must make are both cultural and intellectual. You are not merely required to learn new and different material; you must also master new ways of thinking and studying.

This is a problem for Australian students in Australian universities; it is a problem for students in your own country in your own universities; it is a particular problem for overseas students studying in a foreign institution. For such students the problem is closely related to competence in language, but it is more complex than mere fluency in English. And in the next chapter we shall examine in more detail the nature of this complexity as it arises in the need to think critically and analytically.