1,686 reviews for University of York

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Goodricke on top

Course is taught with almost 0 support, you are provided with a reading list you have to go through and there is the expctation that you will do your own research on the taught content without an indication of how deep you must explore a given subject. Assignments are horrible, the instructions most of the time doesn't make sense as there are inconsistences, the marking criteria are not followed by markers and the feedback are copy-pasted and sometimes completely irrelevant with what was asked from students or to your submission. Markers hide behind "academic judgment" so you really have low chances of getting your work reevaluted. They are aggressively defensive and do not care at all about your mental health or teaching quality. You just have to get on with it.

My department's organisation is not the best. You can feel how enthusiastic all of the tutors are but unfortunately, it doesn't help when our exams are interrupted and changed days or hours before the date. As a dual languages student, administrative inconsistencies across the French and Spanish staff made my year abroad planning a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Unfortunately, the course content for languages is not very varied. You have a large overlap in option modules for second and fourth year (I chose not to do film modules in 2nd year, now I have to choose at least 1 in 4th year because only a few new options are offered).

We had the boiler break over the winter holidays but as only 2/10 of our residents were there, the maintenance staff had to 'decide if it was an emergency' before they came out to help us. For £157/week (in 2022) to live in a house of 10 people with so little cupboard space that we had to keep food in our rooms, it is not great value for money. We definitely had a sense of community over in Halifax and the location is great if you prefer a quieter vibe than a party halls.

The best thing is that everyone is always very helpful and ready to assist you in any ways. The worst thing is probably how difficult is to book office hours

The best thing was that living there makes feel part of a big family. The worst thing about my hall was the promise of a kitchen table in the kitchen that we never got.

Dreadful contact hours but the time you do have in is very good.

It’s amazing to live in especially on campus but it wasn’t cleaned when we arrived in September.

I love that all the lectures are recorded so you can go back and watch at your own pace to help your understanding. The contact hours are fairly low but I prefer this as you can fit other things into your schedule too.

The accommodation is great, like staying in a hotel, however it is very expensive compared to other universities. I also don't like that there's always something they need access to your room for, for example they'll send an email and say that at some point in the next month between 9-5:30 they will enter your room to test something, so you can never fully relax without worrying that someone will walk in e.g while your in the shower/toilet etc...

Great facilities.

Great value.

Best is the teaching. Worst is the facilities sometime the seats make it hard to sit and take notes properly.

Good location. Sometimes there was trouble not addressed or managed.

Lecturers are generally nice and friendly, and the TAs are generally excellent at helping you during lab sessions and helping you figure out how to solve programming issues or explaining concepts. The best part is getting in-person feedback on understanding certain code concepts and debugging the code, which helps you learn from your errors. However, it's rather obvious that for some modules, there's a lack of qualified and good instructors to teach, so they end up allocating any random person to fill that gap. We had an instructor who was only there for that one module - it was her first and last module that she was teaching, greatly indicating that it was a stopgap measure. Lessons are also spread across all 5 days, so it's very inconvenient for students living off-campus, who have to spend valuable time just getting to the class for the day's singular lesson, or for students who want to work on weekdays. It's much better to just put everything in 3 days rather than space things out, which also gives us free days to work on our projects and practice more coding in our free time. Unfortunately, the worst part is that half of the degree so far is essentially useless filler, particularly modules involving "Media Analysis" or any forms of this. You have modules where you just watch movies and hear extremely obvious lectures on what makes a story (Did you know characters should have a backstory and motive to become a better character? What a shocker!) , or where you sit around discussing and 'analyzing' media with other bored students. This might be funny if I weren't paying thousands of pounds for higher education. Unlike American-style education, you don't have any choices to switch to and are begrudgingly forced to go through all these useless modules. Your options for Year 2 are also rather limited, with a good chunk of them covering other areas of (once again impractical) analysis in the same department. You even have one compulsory module for working on a Group Project, I'm sure it will be a great use of my time. The degree is also structured pretty strangely - they spend the first year teaching you a JS library (p5.js) and then teaching you Web Development in Year 2, which should be taught together (After all, HTML, CSS and JS form the backbone of most web dev). I wish they included more in-depth classes which actually teaches you practical skills like 3D modelling or Animation, which could have replaced all the mind-numbing analysis classes. The facilities are also largely underutilised - despite having a TFTI building, you spend most of the time in the Law or Piazza Building, and only use the TFTI building for one module. The degree seems rather flexible, with most of the alumni going on to indie game development, software or related fields. Ultimately, you pretty much have to teach yourself alot of concepts and grind your teeth to get through half of the horrible modules.

Good balance of work and free time. Better lecture halls would be good

Price is too much for what it is but the accommodation is nice and well kept