I am a pre-sessional student at QMUL and I just want to share my experience with everyone who wants to get a place there, especially for those who are interested to attend pre-sessional English course before the LLM. My story is simple, as international student I couldn't achieve the appropriate score in IELTs, which is 7.0 with 7.0 in writing element. As a solution QMUL offered me to attend the pre-sessional English course within the University which costs 2800 pounds (only fees) for courses A, B and C.


After some thoughts and research (Rankings in The Guardian and The Times) regarding to the above University I decided to join this course. Unfortunately, during our preparation, most of us, who became pre-sessional students, before we start our LLM, reveled that this course had nothing to do with English language preparation. The only thing that we have done for 3 months were 3 essays (500-1500 words) and 3 presentations (8-10 minutes each). We have done nothing related to real language improvement. No vocabulary building! No grammar learning! Sometimes we had a feeling that this English course was organised only for one purpose - GET MONEY FROM OUR POCKETS WITHOUT ANY AWARD IN RETURN.

Especially interesting is the course C (we have next 2 weeks for it), which is the last one before our enrollment. In this course we are now doing nothing at all. Moreover, even in Speaking Class we are not speaking, we are just sitting. For us was a surprise that the course C was called "LAW PATHWAY" and the organisers gave us the book which their presumably prepared for this course. We were very happy at the beginning that we will finally start doing something productive in course C. Unfortunately, even in the last course we revealed that all our teachers do not have law background, so their book became useful only for self education. Furthermore, I can say that many of our teachers are highly unprofessionals, I just can assume that probably the organisers of the course just wanted to cut expenses hiring those people.

In any case, I really believe that the above introduction with this University is only at the level of pre-sessional English course, otherwise I have a serious concern about my 7200 pounds which I am going to pay to join their LLM programme.

I suggest everyone, do not pay attention to those Rankings, just try to find your course according to the historical strength of the certain faculty.

I also visited this course (part c) last year and it was very interesting and useful. It included lectures concerning different interesting topics including legal topics with lectures from Law school and CCLS, group presentation, single presentation and essay including 2000 words.

There will be a good insessional grammar course during you main studies.