At Oxford, my degree depended entirely on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year, which were mostly set by different people from the people teaching yo

At Oxford, my degree depended entirely on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year, which were mostly set by different people from the people teaching you. There are issues with this (not least that if you are slightly ill say during the two weeks of exams, it affects your whole degree) but one thing that was really nice compared with the other universities where I have taught is that the relationship with the people teaching you feels fair less adversarial and more cooperative. Also by not having exams in the second year (there were exams in the first year you had to pass but which didn't count towards your degree), there was more emphasis on really understanding the subject rather just jumping through hoops. But I think this only worked because of the teaching system there - as a general rule you had two tutorials a week which were usually one-to-two (or sometimes one-to-one or one-to-three) and it was very hard to slack too much or not do the work for them. Such a system requires a significant amount of funding so probably isn't scalable. Colleges did sometimes set their own internal exams too during the course which didn't count towards your degree (but for which you could get monetary prizes if you did well in them!) but which you could fail which would set a process in motion in which you could be kicked out of the university.