This is what happens when you go to school in Ireland:

You forget how to go to school.

My Scottish friend warned me about this before I left Edinburgh in January. He said school in the UK and Ireland was a semester of doing nothing, followed by two weeks of living in the library. He was right.

At the Dublin Institute of Technology, there are no assignments, papers or exams during the semester. You simply show up for the class, which is once or twice a week, take some notes and then forget about it until the next week. Some people don’t even really go to class, but luckily mine are interesting enough, so I don’t mind going.

Also, with classes only two days a week, it would be really pathetic if I didn’t go.

This system has its advantages, namely the lack of work. I feel like I’m on holiday all the time. This is wonderful after taking three 18-hour semesters at MU, where you actually have to take silly exams during the term – lame.

The other advantage of this system is that I can travel (obviously). This was my life in March (granted, we got a full week off for St. Patrick’s Day):

23: number of days I traveled
8: number of days I spent in Dublin, mostly flying back for class and St. Patrick’s Day.
1.6: average number of days between trips
28: number of flights, bus and train trips taken (8 alone in Romania)

It was exhausting. It was awesome.

But there’s a dark side, namely my past week.

Because there are no real assignments during the semester, it means that final papers and exams are worth anything between 50 and 100 percent of your grade. For example, my documentary studies exam is worth 100 percent of my grade, my political communications grade is divided equally between a long-form article and the final, and two of my classes’ grades are entirely dependent on my final papers.

Final papers are due two weeks before finals, so there’s a bit of a break. Unfortunately, my parents come to Dublin and leave town the day they’re due, so I’m doing my all of final papers in one week.

This wouldn’t normally be stressful (when provided with a constant supply of Diet Coke, I’ve been known to crank out four essays the night before they’re due and actually do well on them), but the stakes are much higher. Also, Diet Coke is really expensive here.

The other curveball the Irish and UK systems throw at you is the grading scale. My Scottish friend told me it would be impossible for me to get anything more than a 90 here. I was a little insulted until he told me no one gets a 90, and even anything above an 80 is the exception to the rule.

Here, a passing grade is more than 40 percent, decent is anything above 50, good is above 60, and you can be extremely pleased with anything above a 70. Ninety percent and up, he explained, are for work that could be published straightaway.

It took a while for my parents to grasp that they should be happy if their daughter gets a 69 in a class.

I’m also struggling to adjust: after a decade and a half of generally receiving above 90 percent on grades, there’s a sense of tragic hopelessness when sitting down to write a paper you know you’ll be absolutely ecstatic to get a 75 on.

One of my professors doesn’t even give above a 70. On anything. Ever.

But I’ve come to terms with it. It’s simply a different scale – it’s the same concept as ours, it’s just the numbers sit a little lower on the charts. In a way, it makes you work a little harder, knowing you can never be quite perfect enough. My Scottish friend still gloriously recounts the day he got a 22/20 on a quiz when he studied at MU. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the paper laminated.

The stakes are higher, this week a little more stressful (mostly because I’m trying to remember how to write essays and attempting to regain an attention span of longer than 10 seconds). But the Irish and UK system is, for me, preferable to the American one. It allows students to work more, to socialize more, to travel more – to see and do and live and be.

Isn’t that really what university is about?