I have 1 lecturer who is boring and who goes through slides too quickly.
Is there a likely possibility of not going to lectures and just relying on textbooks + course notes + tutorials and still do well? Anyone doing this?
Whilst the lecturer may be boring, I think it is much easier to do well if you turn up to class. In my experience, lecturers will have a different focus to their lectures than the readings or the textbooks- they may like some things the readings say and may in fact disagree with stuff. If you don't go, then you won't know. Also, in terms of exams and assignments, I find that lecturers tend to focus on things that will eventually turn up in the exam, if they spend ages talking about a little particular thing then that maybe a hint, rather than whatever the textbooks focus on.
I guess it depends what subjects you are doing- however I have found for history/ancient history etc that the readings for the tutorials don't necessarily cover what was gone through in the lectures- tutorials may in fact focus on one tiny thing that the lectures mentioned, and you will miss the broader scope of what the lecturer was talking about. Of course, these subjects also rarely had textbooks, and if they did, then you generally only read a chapter or two for particular topics- the lectures didn't follow the structure of the textbook at all.
If the powerpoint slides go up, then that maybe might negate needing to go to the lecture- but what if they had 50 slides but actually in the end only went through some of the them, and then said the other slides didn't matter? How would you know? (I've had this happen in lectures before). And some lecturers have slides that are really detailed, and others only have 5 covering a one hour lecture- is that enough to know what they went through?
The other element, is if you don't turn up to class, can you make sure that you will go and do all the readings etc? I tend to find that even if lectures are recorded, you may tell yourself you will go back and listen to the lecture if you miss it, but you rarely do (not until stuvac anyway)- so you just get behind.
Anyway, I'm sure it probably works for some people, but it also doesn't work for many others. My personal opinion is that i'm paying $1,000 a course (or $600 etc), so I want some facetime with a lecturer, rather than just doing a bunch of readings that I could probably could have done in my own time and not necessarily paid for (I see it as attempting to get some value for my money). I only have 4 hours of contact a week per subject (only at uni for like 10 weeks), i might as well go to them.
