Please note: this was originally written in 2013, as such some information may no longer be relevant
Sweden’s educational system is wholly funded by the state. Education is provided for free for all citizens up to and including university level. Not only that, but Swedish students who aren’t working are given living allowances by the governmnet to help them with their living expenses while studying. It does seem crazy but it’s part of their approach of not putting pressure of people to perform exceptionally. This is course goes perfectly with the Swedish desire to be lagom, which is essentially meaning being just right (i.e. average usually)
If you fail an exam, instead of failing the course like in many other places, you can simply resit the exam until you pass
The education system is surprisingly lax, for some of our classes I often wondered how it even qualifies as a course considering how little work was actually required. They also provided extremely long times for people to finish their exams. In Australia, if you have an exam that takes an hour to complete, you’ll be given only three hours. In Sweden, if you have an exam that takes an hour to do, you’ll have four hours to do it. Not only that if but if you fail an exam, instead of failing the course, you can simple resit the exam until you pass. I should say not everyone found their courses this lax so be careful.
While at first it’s nice to have such little pressure, it does have the unintended consequence of making some people too lazy and not bothering to study for their finals, instead opting immediately for a resit. Being a native English speaker made our discussions more interesting. For one of your classes, “Development, Democracy and Governance”, we needed to discuss various questions based on the provided reading material. Luckily for me and some of the other English speakers, we basically hijacked every discussion with some eloquent explanation of our views and thoughts despite the fact these were often not sourced from any academic material.
It wasn’t quite lying, I mean, what we said was true. For example we had a discussion about whether democracy and free media is good for development and we countered by saying that unfortunately in practice democracies often become controlled by large corporations that gain all the power and manipulate the population by gaining control over media channels. This could lead them to shooting down laws that are good for the country but bad for the companies. An example was the introduction of the Carbon Tax and Resource Mining Tax in Australia where this exact thing happened.
So… I wouldn’t say we were lying, what we said was true, it’s just if you asked us for references we probably couldn’t give you any
So… I wouldn’t say we were lying, what we said was true, it’s just if you asked us for references we probably couldn’t give you any. Thankfully, nobody noticed because they were too busy being confused by our fancy words, aren’t we luck.
Life on Exchange at Uppsala University 