On: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

[guard-of-terra]

Don't they have practical courses? Do experiments?

Soviet and post-soviet education systems were modelled after german ones, but lab practice makes around 30%. For more abstract topics, practice/discussion/seminars.

[revelation → guard-of-terra]

There are usually a variety of modules

- lectures: final exam that accounts for 100% of your grade, and sometimes (possibly obligatory) regular homework

- practical courses / labs: how grades are assigned vary, sometimes this will be a "do a project in a team" kind of assignment, sometimes it's experiments where you are expected to write one or more reports

- seminars: you'll be assigned a topic (usually some recent, narrow scientific result, no wildcard giant topics here) and expected to write a report on it & give a presentation

The exact mixture depends on your course of study.

[zwieback → guard-of-terra]

I did have a few "Praktikum" units but they were very crude, basically recreating expected results on very old lab equipment.

In higher level classes I had a lot of really excellent practical projects to work on, some of them directly financed by small and medium companies.

I guess it should be mentioned that most German University degrees take somewhere around 5-6 years so the hands-on work usually comes later.

[ajmurmann → guard-of-terra]

It depends on what you study. In my CS classes we had a few lab sessions where we had to implement small programs and sometimes even larger projects. However, a friend of mine studied chemistry and she never got to leave the lab.