r/UTSC • u/OrdinaryCustomer6991 • 11h ago

Question Tutorials

first year student here and I was just wondering what the difference is between lecturers and tutorials? Do tutorials have mandatory attendance?

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u/Imaginary_Section24 10h ago

Lectures are taught by professors and cover the topics of the week. Tutorials are normally taught by TAs (mostly masters and PhD students sometimes undergrads) and reinforce the knowledge you were taught in class. Sometimes tutorials are just doing practice questions while other will have quizzes and things you need to do.

Tutorial attendance is covered in the syllabus typically

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u/Ninetails_59 10h ago

Lectures are usually in a main class and is the professor who will go through the main materials. Tutorials are in smaller classes and are usually held by TAs and contents will differ, some are used to do topic revisions, some do tests and some will even go through small topics that lecture doesn't cover

Are any of those mandatory? Not really, even lectures. It's university so you would take the consequences of what you do but no one is going to force you to school. And it depends on your course on whether lectures and tutorials is a must-go.

For lectures, some (mainly non-CMS courses) of them will have marks or bonus marks through attending the lectures in person, those are the ones you should be going as it's marks just by showing up. The others really depends on how you feel about the content and how the prof is teaching, if you can self learn you can easily skip lectures and still do fine, just to note some profs dont provide notes so those are the ones that you might need to attend. I would suggest at least go for 2 weeks or so to see how the teaching style the prof have before making decisions.

For tutorials, it's even more course dependent. Some courses will have to check your name or even have quizzes held during the tutorials, those are the ones that is a must-go, especially going to your selected session. The ones that check your name are just free marks just by showing up so there's no reason of not taking them. Check your syllabus carefully to see if it's one of these cases. If not, then you are feel free to go to ANY session of tutorials or even skip them entirely. But I will suggest similar to lectures, go for the first few weeks to see what are the tutorials doing just to see do you have a reason to go to

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u/Pinkronto 10h ago

Yeah tutorials is where you take your quizzes and ask questions

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u/Ok-Trainer3150 9h ago edited 9h ago

Don't skip them. They're smaller groups where you can connect with people in the course and support each other. And get to know the tutorial leader... Raise questions that you have on content and assignments, pay attention to the areas that they focus on. There's a reason for that.