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Modular courses came about as combined honours courses, which had lower student entry requirements than traditional honours degrees ("Students choke on bite-sized learning", THES , October 4; Letters, October 11).

These were meant to be pick-and-mix degrees, where the student was given a choice of two different fields such as accounting and law or accounting and manage-ment.

The comparison with universities in the US stops there. In America, each unit is run several times during the week, whereas in the UK it is run just the once. If the students miss one, then they miss the lot.

Bala Balachandran
Senior lecturer
South Bank Business School