Università degli Studi di Padova (reviews)

I could rant about the University and, in particular, the politics department all day long. I’ll keep it brief, though. For context, I am an international master’s student studying European and Global Studies which is a course run by the Department of Political Science. This department is massively dysfunctional and could not organise a p***-up in a brewery. While this may sound like something that, as a master’s student living abroad in Italy, could be ignored for the benefits of living in Italy generally, it is completely soul-sucking. No one on my course has enjoyed themselves.

Some examples of the poor quality of education: exams are often taken orally in front of the rest of the course, meaning that answers can often be gleaned from classmates beforehand; marks are 90% of the time given arbitrarily with no feedback. Same quality of answer from two students will often not have same result – either bc favouritism or something more nefarious. I have also never had a well-organised exam i.e. on time or with enough space in the room for the students. late exams have ranged from 30 mins to about 3 hours. Maybe this is normal for Italy or specific to the department, I don’t know, but it is such a waste of time and shows how little they value the student.

The quality of the teaching is also disappointing. It is generally slow and read from the slide. Moreover, I am on an English-language course and I can safely say only about 50% of the professors have had an above B2 level of English. One of them had to read from a prepared script to even teach the lesson. Native speakers such as myself are at a massive advantage too – it often feels during the oral exams that merely speaking at the teachers fluently and quickly is enough to score high grades. I’m not joking, I scored a 30 cum laurea by just speaking quickly.

Finally, the way they ask for theses to be written here makes 0 sense. They ask for a 50,000-word piece, which is a stupidly massive article. The professors are at least open about the fact they will never read these, which is incredibly demoralising and makes your work feel worthless. This is a common theme with much smaller 3,000-word essays too. How on Earth can they expect to mark these if they will never read them? From a small 10-minute presentation on graduation day, apparently. Again, their grading feels so baseless and arbitrary .

There’s loads of other examples I could use too. They need to sort themselves out.