Undergraduate Supervisions at Cambridge

Supervisions are intensive, flexible, and bespoke teaching sessions which aim to support students to thrive intellectually and realise their full academic potential.  They do this through providing opportunities to engage in collaborative and autonomous learning with peers and academic staff, and for personal development.   Supervisions rely on mutual respect between student and supervisor.

Supervisions are valuable because they help students to learn:

• skills to help them develop as a scholar
• how to structure and present data and arguments
• how to incorporate feedback provided into their work
• how to organise their learning
• how to clarify and explore ideas and issues they have been taught; and
• how to question their assumptions.

Supervision work will vary widely, as it is based on the needs of individual students. Supervisors will be experts in the subject and will take student needs into account when setting work. Supervisors will design work which is complementary to and has a clear relationship with the published curricula for the course.  As this work will vary, it is not required that written work must be set and marked at every supervision; work may take the form of close readings or discussion-based sessions on a topic, presentations, problems or examples sheets worked individually or as a group, or field-based sessions.

Supervisions vary between subjects but often have 2-3 students and one teacher in a weekly session.

Colleges pay for supervisions. Reports submitted by supervisors, to provide feedback to their students, are also used by Colleges to process payments for the work of their supervisors.

Payment rates are set by individual Colleges, which will be at least as high as the intercollegiate recharge rate. The intercollegiate recharge rate is used by Colleges to pay for supervisions provided by other Colleges, and is set annually.

The supervision payment rate includes preparation, teaching and marking.

The amount of teaching a supervisor provides varies, due to the subject being taught and each student's particular needs. On average 70% of supervisors provide 50 supervisions or fewer a year.

A minority of supervisions (20% on average per academic year) are delivered by postgraduate students. Postgraduate students can choose to supervise, developing their teaching skills and preparing for future employment. In turn undergraduates benefit from receiving tuition from supervisors active in research within their studied subject.

Students undertaking taught Masters courses are not expected to work during term-time.

The University recommends that full-time postgraduate research students undertaking a course of more than 12 months, or the MPhil by thesis, work to up to 6-10 hours per week. Such students may undertake longer working hours after explicit discussion with their Supervisor and their College Tutor, but even then students must never exceed a maximum of 20 hours of work each week.

Most supervisors are self-employed. Some supervisors are contracted by Colleges, for example as College Teaching Officers, and supervision teaching forms part of their contract. Some supervisors have contracts with one or more Colleges. 

Directors of Studies in Colleges typically arrange supervisors to teach their students. They monitor their supervisors' performance and effectiveness, and address any concerns raised about the quality of the provision.

• There are nearly 250,000 supervisions each academic year, delivered by 4,800 supervisors.
• Approximately 30% of all supervisors are postgraduate students, 20% are early career unestablished researchers, 20% are University Teaching Officers, and 15% are College Fellows (15% are ‘Other’).
• Approximately 20% of supervisions are provided by postgraduate students, 10% by early career unestablished researchers, 25% by University Teaching Officers, and 30% by College Fellows (15% by ‘Other’).

An ‘Initial Payment’ is given to new supervisors, as recognition of the additional preparation needed at the outset to take on the role of supervising undergraduates. That preparation will include a mixture of required online and face-to-face training, as well as other orientation exercises at the new supervisor’s discretion.