Are my expectations for undergraduate student support unrealistic? I'm attending a Russel group university in the UK, and studying Computer Science in the 2nd year of an undergraduate degree.

I'm reasonably happy with the vast majority of the taught content, but sometimes certain parts of the syllabi trip me up or I'm not sure if I'm correctly understanding how to approach solving certain problems. At Sixth Form, if I was stuck I'd try and work it out myself and then ask the subject tutor if I wasn't getting anywhere.

At university, there appears to be a stark difference in the academic support offered. Many lecturers do not have regular office hours and are unresponsive when asked if an appointment could be scheduled. Questions sent via email aren't comprehensively addressed, even when it's clear that substantial independent work using external resources (content from other universities, various textbooks etc) has been done to try and tackle the problem (vs. simply asking for an answer with no work to show for it). There's little I can do other than consult my peers when I don't understand something - and if many of us are stuck we feel completely lost.

There also seems to be a difference in the support materials provided. Many modules don't publish example problems or solutions, provide any form of solutions to past exam questions or sign-post relevant textbook exercises. This differs greatly to previous exams prior to university, where the exam board would make marking schemes, model solutions and examiner reports available each year. I feel ill-prepared for most exams, because I find it difficult to verify my answers to practice problems are correct.

Is this the norm for undergraduate study, or are these signs of issues within my department? Are my expectations in terms of academic support unrealistic?
Are my expectations in terms of academic support unrealistic?


Yes. You're describing the general existing level of academic support at your school, and that is by definition the normal level of academic support at your school.

This kind of thing varies greatly from one school to another, and most of the variation depends on the prestige of the school. Your school is in the Russell Group, which AFAICT (being American) means that it's a top-level research university with highly selective admissions. At that type of school, faculty are often highly focused on research rather than teaching, and the attitude is often that if an undergrad was smart enough to get in, they should be smart enough to succeed by going to lectures, reading the book, and doing the work independently.

Taking an example of such a school at the University of California system here in the US, the schedule of office hours published for math and psychology suggests that different departments have different expectations for faculty office hours, and some faculty have no office hours at all, even though they are teaching lecture classes. Presumably there are TAs for a lot of these courses.

As you move down the ladder to less prestigious schools here in the US, you see more and more academic support being offered. Here in California, we have a three-tier system. The next tier below UC is the Cal State system. There, a typical teaching load might be 12 units, and someone teaching that many units is contractually required to have 4 hours of office hours every week.

After that, the next step down is the community college system. At the California community college where I teach, I'm required to do 5.5 hours of office hours every week. We also have extensive support services. We have a math lab, writing tutors, and students paid to work as tutors in the sciences.


  There also seems to be a difference in the support materials provided. Many modules don't publish example problems or solutions, provide any form of solutions to past exam questions or sign-post relevant textbook exercises.


This type of support is the sort of thing that is typically considered normal at the lower rungs of the ladder, but not at the higher rungs. At the type of school you're attending, the expectation in a certain course might be, for example, that you decide for yourself what problems to do out of the book, rather than being given a list. If you need to see solutions for exercises, you can, for example, find a textbook on the subject that has solutions for some problems.