Erasmus at ELTE
Posted by _Raker_@reddit | budapest | View on Reddit | 8 comments
Hi guys, I need some help from you.
I am a 3rd year student (Bachelor's degree) from Palermo, Italy, and I won the Erasmus scholarship to come to Budapest at ELTE's faculty of informatics. I've known that attendance is mandatory, and because I can freely choose the courses, I am afraid that I'm going to need to choose to attend only a couple of courses, because of any possible overlap between lessons.
A professor from ELTE responsible for the Erasmus Agreement between Budapest and Palermo, told me that there are more groups for every course, but how much does it ensure having no overlap? Basically I don't want to risk slowing down my college career, so, are the professors that strict when it comes to attendance? Is it actually a common thing for courses to potentially overlap?
NoobPLyer29@reddit
Yes but no. 2 of my friends literally only been to uni at max 4 times this year. They study at home and go in to write exams or what we call them zh. There are some classes where the teacher asks for attendence but most dont. You need to see it for yourself at the begeining which ones you can skip if you want to.
electro-cortex@reddit
Your post is slightly off-topic, I think there is an r/elte subreddit where you can get better answers anyway. Alternatively, you can try to ask this on r/egyetemistak (Hungarian university students) or r/askhungary (general askreddit of Hungary).
Open-Conversation-11@reddit
I studied BSc at ELTE faculty of informatics. Yes the attendance is mandatory, however not every professor is actively checking it. Also there are two types of classes: lecture and practice. If your practice class overlaps with your lecture, you are required to go to the practice, and you don't have to attend the lecture (you should tell the professor about the overlap, but he will accept it, also he might check your attendance of the other class, but usually they don't really care)
foxinneighborhood@reddit
Search for a student mentor through Erasmus student network
LuccyB@reddit
There are several kinds of courses in Hungarian universities: lectures are not mandatory (unless the professor says so, but that's not common), seminars (mandatory attendance, can only miss 20% so about 2 occasions) etc.
There are several groups for one seminar, yes. When I studied at ELTE I never had a problem with overlapping courses. Professors are also more flexible because they know how shit this system is. If you do manage to get overlapping courses, talk to the professor of the course and ask if you could attend another of their course instead of the one you took.
_Raker_@reddit (OP)
Nice, this is reassuring to me. I was wondering in fact if I could ask the professor about giving me some more flexibililty being an Erasmus student, so knowing that they themself are usually more flexible is great. Thanks a lot for your answer :)
How are exams structured? I mean, I come from Italy and we probably have a really different system. For example, at least from what I understood, you don't have a lot of oral exams (if not at all).
PixAlan@reddit
Yeah at the faculty of informatics only the HC math/theory courses have oral exams where you have to prove formulas usually, you have to present your projects on some programming courses but it's chill usually. For theory/math courses you'll have 1-3 written exams during the semester and final exam which usually has a written part and an oral part, for programming courses you'll have 1-3 projects, live coding exams at the end of the semester and in some cases you might even have a theory focused written exam.
ELTE IK is also kinda special, they take attendance very seriously, while it's indeed not mandatory to attend lectures at most unis as the commenter above said, it is at ELTE, at least for hungarian students, the english courses are often handled differently though so I'm not certain.
I might be wrong on this as I haven't done it but on erasmus you essentially do your "free to choose" credits, no? That should give you plenty of flexibility, but avoiding overlap is not always easy, idk how much they help erasmus students with this.
LuccyB@reddit
That really depends on the course you are taking and the faculty you will be attending. I can't say much about the Faculty of Informatics as it's not the one I studied at.
Oral exams are generally less common, and I can't imagine you'd have an oral exam in an informatics-related course. Also, in my experience, professors usually prefer written exams because it's less effort for them too. Written exams are usually multiple-choice, but there can be open-ended questions and essay-type questions as well, depending on the course.
Perhaps someone studying at the faculty could help more. There's r/ELTEIKmemes (IK = Informatikai Kar = Faculty of Informatics), or perhaps ask on r/hungary (but that one's a shithole so mods might delete your post).