Introduction

The notion of a risk society is primarily associated with work of Beck (1992, and see the interview with Beck in Journal of Consumer Culture 2001) and Giddens (1991), although Douglas is also influential (see Bellaby and Lawrenson, 2001). The main arguments are well-known - that risks are increasing in extent and reach, new distinctive risks are associated with modernity, and that social and cultural arrangements for dealing with risk are being overwhelmed. In discussing the last point, Beck in particular seems to identify excessive individualism as a characteristic that undermines the usual collective mechanisms for managing risk. Together with Giddens, an important aspect for Beck is the spread of increasingly corrosive forms of reflexivity that turn back on themselves to undermine collective understandings. Reflexivity out of social control produces disembeddedness, scepticism towards older forms of authority, including science and technology, and the growth of cynicism.

As collective understandings dissipate, ‘enforced individualism’ (Journal of Consumer Culture, 2001) develops, so that consumers of British beef (for example) are forced to bear the risks themselves, or, following the emergence of looser forms of kinship, 'Individuals must choose who is to be regarded as their main father, their main mother and who is their grandmother and grandfather' (Journal of Consumer Culture, 2001: 263). In particular, risk society (or ‘second modernity’ in a later formulation) warns people about not doing things, but does not tell them what to do instead. 'Nobody knows how to legitimate any course of action' (ibid: 271). Unlike Giddens, Beck warns that this means we should not simply celebrate the ‘choice’ that the new flexibility of social structures can bring or assume that new forms of negotiated ‘embedding’ will rapidly emerge to guide choices anew.

Giddens in particular sees sociology as making a contribution towards increased reflexivity in social life: 'It would not be at all unusual to find a coroner who had read Durkheim' (1991: 42). Sociological thinking has penetrated public life, and has had considerable benefits in liberating people from the old social forms. However, it is possible to suggest that the social sciences in particular are likely to lead to a more specific kind of corrosive reflexivity mentioned above as well. There may be a much more specific and deliberate mechanism for the transmission of corrosive sociological reflexivity to public life than the rather vague and general influences on public opinion through the media that Giddens seems to rely upon. Social sciences and humanities courses have the capacity to induce reflection upon the mundanity of ordinary life in a way that other academic subjects probably do not do. Going to university is a specific mechanism for the diffusion of this sort of experience, one that is specifically intended to have a reflexive effect. Certainly, such reflexivity is often enshrined in assessment regulations, as students are urged to ‘critically analyse’ and discuss arguments and ‘apply’ them to examples from everyday life. If the teaching system works as intended, social science students will experience some of the most acute effects of disembedding and enforced individualism.

However, it is clearly debatable whether this capacity and potential will be realized. As we shall see below, there are many ways to avoid a confrontation with the critical capacities of academic knowledge and to resist its effects. It is not at all certain that the actual experience of study will provide enough insight to be able to weaken the conservative tendencies of ideologies, habituses or the nomic practices of every day life (to invoke some obvious issues). It is quite possible that some limited and perhaps strategic reflexivity will result, leading to an ability and willingness to criticize every position and stance but one’s own – the classic cultural position of the (often university-educated) new petite bourgeoisie in Bourdieu’s work (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984).

This is a rather general way to connect the experience of attending university with the notion of risk, but there are many more specific mechanisms at work in universities which might be examined. There is the obvious risk posed by the assessment scheme for example. Today, higher education is expected to promote achievements not only in terms of both subject disciplines but also in terms of students’ future employability. This is known to be a challenging task, and it has been argued that radical rethinking of assessment schemes is called for; tweaking around the edges of existing approaches is not enough (Knight and Yorke, 2003). 

It is all too easy for teachers and lecturers to forget that gaining a low grade in an assignment can have important social and personal consequences for the student, as the commentaries on the widespread ‘fear of failure’ indicate (e.g. Jackson, 2003). This fear can be grounded in more than just the specific need to gain good grades: as with all socially mobile persons, students 'from unconventional backgrounds' can find themselves leaving one social group and identity, not without pain, and finding their admission to another social group conditional upon passing a rather challenging set of tests: they also know they cannot go back (Reay, 2002). Students coming to do ‘practical’ or ‘vocational’ courses, where they may possess some relevant experience already, often do not realize they are taking on a substantial academic agenda as well which will involve them in new challenges, rather unlike the ones they have met before.

Being assessed by a university can also pose a challenge to any student from any background. Goffman's (1968) study of stigma refers to the risk posed by meeting experts who claim to be able to diagnose special kinds of weakness or inadequacy, that remain unknown to lay people, which is exactly what university assessors do. It is possible to suggest that the move towards highly diverse forms of assessment has brought that risk to the forefront for every kind of student. It may well be the case that traditional forms of assessment, such as the classic essay, still rewards the cultural capital of upper-class or aristocratic groups, but there might be not such a clear link between the distribution of cultural capital and performance on assessment tasks such as group presentations, 'practical', vocational assignments, performance, or many other elements of the profile.

A number of classic studies indicate that students are aware of the need to manage risk as part of their routine activities in schools and universities. Doyle and Carter (in Hammersley, 1988) analyzed classroom tasks in terms of the 'ambiguity' and 'risk' they offered, and indicated how both students and teachers managed both dimensions. Typically, for example, a task in English composition would be made deliberately ambiguous in order to allow students to show that they possessed an ability to apply what they had learned to a new context. If such a task played a major part in the assessment regime, it was deemed to have a high degree of risk. Students would then attempt to reduce the ambiguity, by asking teachers for clarification, further definitions, worked examples, or comments and feedback on their early drafts. Teachers would oblige, because they saw that as their main pedagogic contribution, and there is a hint in the study of a general interest in students achieving good grades as well. This study illuminates some of the behaviour described as ‘teaching to the test’, which runs a whole range of activity from organising ‘revision sessions’ to illegally leaking test questions.

Other famous studies of student activity to reduce risk include the work of Miller and Parlett (1974) on 'cue-seeking', a technique designed to reduce the risks of unseen examinations in particular at Edinburgh University by trying to detect various clues about content offered by lecturers. The classic work of Becker et al. (1995) (originally undertaken in 1968) takes a broader approach to student 'instrumentalism', which seems dominant in the 'academic side of college life' at Kansas University. Student techniques to reduce risk here include learning how to 'selectively neglect' quite substantial parts of the syllabus in order to focus on frequently assessed topics, and how to please specific tutors by writing work designed to appeal to their interests. 'Playing the game' means playing safe, taking no risks, avoiding personal thoughts in assignments and declining the potential personal challenges offered by academic work.

More recently, there have been studies of British student activities which range from 'learning the rules of the game' to explicit cheating (Franklyn-Stokes et al., 1995; Norton et al., 2001). One interesting aspect of Norton et al. (2001) on rules of the game is that students believe that following these inexplicit rules will lead to better results, although the evidence does not actually support that belief. Miller and Parlett (1974) and Becker et al. (1995) also found some negative cases, where cue-seeking or playing the game did not bring the best results. There is also some reluctance to take the risk of crossing into actual cheating behaviour, although fear of being found out is a relatively minor factor. What these findings indicate is that students may not be capable of very accurate predictions or calculations of either the size of the risks they face or the efficacy of the strategies they use to reduce them. This may be particularly so for British students who can lack that collective wisdom and techniques to neutralize guilt provided by American student subcultures and organized fraternities/sororities, leaving only the kind of ‘enforced individualism’ discussed above. 

Of course, students need not manage risks entirely on their own, as the Doyle and Carter study shows. There is the merest hint of tutor activity in reducing risk in Miller and Parlett (1974) as well. On a more systematic level, the management of risk could be seen as a central principle informing modern pedagogic practice as expressed in government-sponsored studies of effective teaching, and the good practice disseminated by the HEA. Urging tutors to specify learning outcomes, for example, can be seen as an organizationally-approved risk management strategy, where any ambiguity is supposed to be removed at the design stage in the interests of effective teaching. More generally, the whole inspection or quality assurance regime might well have led to a certain instrumentalism among staff who also feel they have to 'play the game', as the recent controversy over the QAA result at Warwick University indicates. One aspect of playing the game might well be to display suitably challenging and ambiguous (in the good sense) written assignments for inspection, while quietly pursuing the risk-management strategies found in the literature.

 

A specific interest of this paper is study skills regimes. Study skills programmes have become popular in universities, partly as a response to the challenges faced by widening access and becoming a 'mass' education system. Of course, the pressures are unevenly borne across the sector, but common dilemmas arise in terms of balancing access against the maintenance of standards. As a technical problem, it is sometimes discussed as modifying a teaching system for elite institutions in order to deal with students who are relatively inexperienced in elite education. The history of the Open University is instructive here, in that it was designed allegedly to deal with that very dilemma. As the early documents establishing the OU made clear, a particular kind of rationalized teaching system was seen to be required, laying the foundations precisely of the kind of modern pedagogic practice discussed above (Harris, 1987). An interest in developing study skills soon followed, and again, OU practice has been seminal, illustrated best, perhaps by the work of Northedge (1990) or Morgan (1993). The OU example is also instructive in another important sense, because the first cohorts that were so successful were often well qualified already, and therefore probably did not need specific instructions in study skills, or, for that matter, a specifically rationalized pedagogy.

Rather as with 'rational curriculum planning' models of course design, official study skills regimes may represent the working ideology of university pedagogues rather than a series of proven techniques that can be applied to the matter of learning particular sets of material. Certainly, convincing research is lacking to show that, as an abstract technique, they do actually lead to cognitive gains (Henderson and Nathenson, 1984). Research tends to qualify the effectiveness of study skills regimes by insisting that it is learning style that is linked to academic and personal success in the university context. Study skills that lead to and foster a 'deep' learning style, or even a suitably versatile set of styles deployed strategically, will be effective. Unfortunately, and this is too large a debate to be covered in this paper, many conventional study skills seem to be devoted to aspects of 'surface learning' as it used to be called - memorising facts, pursuing a banal mnemonic to take extensive notes, or trying to produce an answer to an assignment by a reproduction strategy that depends heavily upon the tutor and the syllabus, rather than attempting to achieve some personal understanding and connection with existing knowledge. The OU Study Methods Group have indicated that what is really required here is a close personal joint diagnosis of students' approaches to learning, combined with the skilled provision of alternative personal strategies (see Morgan, 1993).

Conventional study skills courses do not seem to convince students either, and thus have to take their chance alongside more dubious approaches already in use – playing the game, cheating, cue-seeking and the rest. Increasingly, students have had specific training in study skills at school or college before attending, and so might want to retain the use of techniques that have proved successful in the past, even though the nature of the task and the accompanying risks have changed in the new context. One area that has been discussed in this context concerns plagiarism, for example. Briefly, extremely accurate and precise referencing seems not to be always required at AS-level, so that students can be led to miscalculate risks in that grey area of student behaviour covered by a policy on plagiarism and referencing. This particular lack of knowledge might be the real issue in the general finding that students often do not know their institution's policy on plagiarism (Norton et al., 2001)

There is another more general way in which management strategies might lag behind the new conditions of risk. Whether teaching study skills or effective learning styles can replace these strategies has been debated (see, for example Entwistle, 2000). Students can come to University with a pre-existing set of problem-solving strategies, what might be called general orientations or coping strategies developed to overcome the difficulties that life presents. These are rooted in social conditions of life and may be held unconsciously. De Certeau refers to an overall tactical orientation among ‘the powerless’, involving 'clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, manoeuvres...' (1984: xix), which comprise a kind of ‘popular cultural capital’ (Fiske, 1987). Techniques of ‘poaching, tricking, reading, strolling, shopping, desiring’ (Frow 1991) found in everyday life might lie behind learning to play the rules of the game or cheat. Conversely, it is possible that the unconsciously-held 'high aesthetic' identified by Bourdieu could be the general form of 'deep' approaches to learning (Harris, 2005). It might also be possible to suggest that these general orientations find expression in leisure activity. 

Much remains to be specified and researched in this area if we are to move away from general speculation. As a contribution, we offer a summary of new research designed to shed light on students’ expectations of university in general, and behaviours relating to academic work and study skills in particular. The findings are illuminating in that they give insights into perceptions of risk and the impact of such perceptions on both academic and non-academic performances of a particular groups of students, i.e. students from ‘unconventional’ or untypical backgrounds.  We also draw on the data more speculatively to pursue some initial questions about the risk behaviours of sports students.

Research methods and analysis

New empirical data were collected from undergraduate students studying at a college of higher education in the south west of England. Whilst the college is not that typical of contemporary higher educational institutions, one interesting aspect is that it admits a higher than average quota of untypical students (low academic achievers, for example, mature students or students who have reached university via non-‘A’-level routes) and as a result makes for a good ‘pole’ case.

We constructed a short questionnaire for undergraduate students made up of open questions covering both academic and social aspects of university life, with a particular focus on how study skills were acquired and refined whilst completing a degree.  Both a hard copy and an electronic version of the questionnaire were made available to potential respondents. 

Some 25 completed responses were returned. Twenty-one of these were completed by students from England; the remaining four were completed by students who normally lived in the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, the Netherlands and Jersey but were currently in the UK for various reasons, including participating in an exchange scheme. The majority of respondents were undertaking BA honours degrees; subject areas included sociology, tourism and leisure, sport and recreation studies, sport development, management, communication, art and design, computing and information technology, and geography. 

The analysis used the ‘Framework’ technique (Ritchie and Spencer, 1994), which involves familiarisation with the data collected, followed by the identification and interpretation of key topics and issues that emerge from the accounts.

 Survey findings

 1.  Expectations of academic life

We asked respondents about their expectations of academic life, and how realistic these were. The analysis showed that some students had anticipated that university would be similar to school and an extension of the sixth form, but this view is open to question (see below). Others thought that they would be encouraged to be independent and take responsibility for their own learning. Yet others thought that university would be demanding and challenge them academically, and they anticipated struggling. One person remembered thinking: ‘Oh my God, what am I doing’ because they did not think they were clever enough to be at university. 

Generally speaking, the reality was not borne out for those who thought the work would be demanding: respondents did not find themselves working all the time, they were not as busy studying as they had imagined they would be and on the whole they perceived they coped well. As one person said: ‘It certainly wasn’t as much of a painful transition from A levels as I had anticipated’. 

Not surprisingly, students’ expectations about their new social life at university tended to focus on positive aspects (with the exception of anxieties about getting into debt – see below). Opportunities for meeting new friends and having a good nightlife were emphasised, as was having an exciting time. These expectations were met for some, but not all, respondents. One person who had to do some re-evaluating in the hard light of day was a student who had been looking forward to ‘freedom’ and being ‘grown up’ which in practice entailed socialising and spending time in the pub at the expense of completing course work. Unfortunately, this person’s belief that they could leave things until just a few days before the examinations did not bear fruit and they failed two exams. Whilst this was a hard lesson to learn, to quote the respondent: ‘After that I put my priorities straight’. 

2.  Specific challenges

Respondents were asked to identify specific problems they encountered whilst at university. The analysis shows that generally these fell into one of two categories: different aspects of academic work, and managing money and staying out of debt. 

As far as academic work was concerned, challenges identified included: reading widely; tackling difficult assignments; time management; presentations; doing well in examinations and different lecture styles. One respondent commented on the process of getting to grips with what was actually required in lectures, seminars and essays. For example, was it acceptable to speak your mind and/or to challenge lecturers? Or was it the case that speaking out too much risked coming across as being a ‘smart arse’. Another, who twice mentioned coming from a working class background and clearly perceived this as a barrier to achieving a good degree, said: ‘Generally, I didn’t have the first idea what was the difference between a seminar and a lecture; had never been taught to write an essay and generally felt that everything seemed to be geared up to a type of education that was alien to me. Once again, I just felt like the working class kid in the wrong place’. 

Maintaining high levels of motivation when attending lectures on only two days a week, or not being forced to do work, was also viewed as a problem. With the benefit of hindsight, one respondent compared school and university as follows: ‘It is a world of difference from school where you are made to do work. If you don’t do it at uni nobody cares; you just get kicked off the course. It is difficult to get things done when you have to leave notes for lectures all the time and make appointments, so I didn’t! I pretty much winged my whole degree – awesome!’. 

Making judgements about who is responsible for ‘enforcing’ acceptable student behaviour and performance is difficult. The view of one respondent highlights tensions between personal responsibility and institutional responsibility: ‘You are allowed to do everything you want; your presence isn’t even required as long as you get your results. Even then, when your marks aren’t good they won’t look at you except when it’s time to leave, because of your bad grades or when you haven’t paid!’

Other perceived difficulties that were more obviously the responsibility of the institution and not under the control of individual students related to poor course organisation and new courses still to bed down properly. Even so, students still had to manage them as best they could. 

Having enough money to live on and managing money was a huge challenge for respondents. Indeed, one person went so far as to say: ‘Debt is a requirement of going to university these days’.

3.  Minimising the risks of failure

How did respondents rise to the challenge of achieving a good degree? Were there any particular strategies or techniques that they employed to neutralise the risks of failure? The questionnaire responses show that many students actively sought out help and advice from lecturers. This could range from discussing ideas and concerns to help with structuring an essay. As one person said: ‘I can’t express just how useful this was, and how important a factor it was in getting good grades … I mean, there’s no point in second guessing what needs to be done, or diving in with doubts that could easily be addressed beforehand is there?’ 

 
Respondents also asked for help from their peer group, house mates, family and friends. Asking someone to read through a piece of written work, and/or proof reading it, was common. Some people rehearsed presentations; others worked in study groups. However, who belongs to your group is clearly important and one person reported that it was important to avoid group work with ‘slackers’ and instead ‘get in with the “swots”!!!’. This same respondent also emphasised the need to be strategic and choose what to study as it did not seem vital to know about everything in each module. 

Whilst study skills courses were not that popular, those who had taken advantage of them had found the specific techniques they learned such as mind mapping and directed reading helpful. 

 
Other tactics to minimise risk employed by respondents included: good time management, not falling behind and finishing assessed work in good time; working out just what essay questions meant; practising past examination questions; reflecting on, and learning from, previous assessed work; drawing on a wide range of resources including books, journal articles and the Internet; using the assessment criteria. 

These active help-seeking techniques suggest that students deliberately try to minimise failure in way that is acceptable in terms of academic conventions and standards. However, that is not always the case. One respondent was exceptional in that s/he admitted voluntarily to committing plagiarism: ‘I had a very close class, everybody helped each other. There was always someone that knew people in other classes, so I could copy their graded assignments and just hand it in. I knew in advance if the assignment was available from someone. If not, I would have enough time to work on it’. 

As far as staying out of debt was concerned, some people worked either part- or full-time throughout their degree course in order to stay out of debt. Those who were able to change the number of hours they worked tended to work part-time and then increase their hours temporarily when they were less busy with academic work. 

4.  Balancing studying, social life and staying out of debt

Respondents held polarised views about whether or not there was any conflict between completing the work required of them, enjoying a good social life and staying out of debt: some said no whilst others said yes. Those who believed there was a conflict gave clues as to how they tried to delay or minimise tensions, for instance by getting help with assignments from other students, living at home, accepting financial support from parents, ‘training’ themselves to stay in and work, taking out a student loan, and undertaking full- or part-time work. One person explained how cutting down on their social life was doubly advantageous in that there was more time for academic work and it relieved the pressure of debt. Another respondent had also scaled down their social life temporarily, and gave an insight into the sort of financial economies that current-day students may be making by reporting that drinking was too expensive so they were taking Ecstasy instead!

5.  Making trade-offs

On the whole, respondents were clear about the importance of a good social life whilst at university. This period in people’s lives was seen as one for making friends and enjoying the ‘good times’ as they would be with them for the rest of their lives. However, this approach was not pursued at the risk of failing to obtain a good degree. Common advice included indulging in social activities for the first (and possibly second) year, but then really focussing down on work thereafter. Given that the majority of respondents were in their first or second years, then this recommendation may be more of a hope than an actual practice! One respondent who said they were constantly trying to balance their social life with their academic life went on to say: ‘I eventually realised that I wasn’t going to get a first but could feasibly get a 2:1 and maintain some form of outside interests’. 

 Discussion

The first point to make is to acknowledge the limitations of the above findings which are based on a small number of survey responses from students attending the same higher education institution. It goes without saying that we are keen to open up the data collection to a wider range of respondents, but because there is no funding for the research we are obviously limited in what we can do. Ideally, the survey responses, which in effect help shed light on semi-deviant activities and the unofficial coping strategies employed by students, should be augmented by other data, possibly participant observation. We have some experience, as teachers, but this is unlikely to be very rigorous. These various restrictions clearly limit the work, and as just indicated we make no claims for how representative the study sample is, or the generalisability of the findings. However, the preliminary findings we are presenting today are valuable in that they present a snapshot of student experiences from an institution that can be regarded as a leading edge example of the future mass higher education system.  

Our research has shown findings, however, that resonate with the wider literature on risk. For instance, one cluster of risk factors and management strategies might be found in the responses of mature working–class female students. This group has been studied by Plummer (2000), Cannon (2001) and Reay (e.g. 2002, 2003). Mature students in particular have been seen as suffering from an excessive anxiety about grading. Hopper and Osborne (1975) argued that mature students have had to make considerable economic and social sacrifices to attend university, so there is a lot at stake for them in doing well. Reay (2002) points out that the future cannot simply be enjoyed even if they do well, however, since a ‘classed’ notion of authenticity requires some relation to the past to be worked on and established.

Reay (2003) actually begins her study with an account of risk society which is rather similar to our own and suggests that one way of managing the enforced individualism noted by Beck, and the continued allegiance to class of origin, despite Beck’s prediction, is to maintain a kind of popular service ethic, promising to ’give back’ to the community from which they sprang. This may be expressed in the intention to teach or engage in social work, rather than embracing more general politics. The stance may be a personal rationalization or a genuine resource to manage individualised risk, and whether it will survive subsequent occupational cynicism and burn-out, common in the ‘semi-professions’, is more debatable.

Another interesting cluster consists of some younger non-conventional students about whom less is known at present. This group has established itself in a noticeable way in the higher education institution where we have done our preliminary research, and they figure quite prominently in our sample: they tend to be relatively poorly-qualified and often admitted during the Clearing process, and choose leisure- or sports-related subjects. They are the object of stereotyped views that sees them as ‘difficult’ to teach, uncritically macho (even the women), unable or unwilling to work within the academic culture of the college. It is worth stating immediately that these are dangerous generalizations to make, overlooking the many talented and well-motivated students one finds on sports-related courses, including the group which has succeeded in the intense competition for admittance before Clearing.

The low expectations often attached to this group can echo some old and familiar sociological work, tracing an early opposition between success in academic and sporting student subcultures in US high schools (developed originally in Coleman in 1959 – see Halsey, Floud and Anderson, 1961). Coleman identifies a number of factors in the sporting subculture which run counter to official academic values. In particular, sports offer a chance for meritocratic but collective rather than individual achievement. Institutions want to reward sporting achievements for similar reasons – sporting achievement is lasting and gains status for the College, exacerbated in present conditions by the struggle to identify a niche market. These days, sports students are able to gain Government support in their views that sports offer healthy and ‘stress-busting’ activity, as well as an open route to social success, compared to the lonely, unhealthily indoor and ‘stressed-out’ life of the ‘boffin’.

Sports students may be focusing on a number of other more general anti-academic factors. Sport is also a key site for the reproduction of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ for a number of analysts (see Light and Kirk, 2000), although it is necessary to point out that this reproduction is complex, sometimes contested and inflected with other forms of identity politics. Archer et al. (2001) have shown how such hegemonic masculinity can act as a constraint on applying for university in the first place. For white working-class males in particular, ‘traditional’ work offers more chances to reproduce an acceptable masculinity, while academic study seems to offer only risks of various kinds. This is based on a nostalgia for older class identities, but also a ‘pragmatic’ calculation that a degree will not necessarily deliver economic benefits. Archer et al. do not study those working class males who do get to university, but one aspect of their study is of special interest - what Beezer (1995) has called ‘male heroics’: the deliberate choice not to plan ahead but to seek adventure, to ‘wing it’ in the phrases of one of our respondents (who belongs in this category).

That phrase also alludes to another interesting characteristic of this group: sportspeople may well enjoy risk at higher levels than others (they also develop various ‘risk denial’ strategies – Peretti-Watel, 2003 – or an acquired ambivalence towards risk, including fatalist views – Natalier, 2001). It is risk that helps focus attention on the leisure or sports task, and, as long as it is balanced with a suitable level of competence, risky leisure can deliver a particularly pleasurable experience usually referred to as ‘peak experiences’ (originally based on Maslow’s work), 'flow', ‘adventure experience’, (see Jones et al., 2003), or even as a kind of religiosity (see Le Breton, 2000 on extreme sports). Such work can remind us that students might be aiming not to completely eliminate risk altogether from their university work, but to maintain the optimal level of risk.

Certain levels of risk are pleasurable and motivating, and it would be interesting to see if there is some kind of transfer between liking risky leisure pursuits and engaging in the riskier kinds of academic behaviour – plagiarism for instance. It is not clear from the quote above (about copying another student’s graded assignment) whether the student concerned was aware that plagiarism is an offence that has become a matter of widespread concern in modern universities. If they were, then what is interesting here is that they chose to risk getting into trouble and being accused of cheating rather than ‘playing safe’ and submitting their own work. Certainly, some of the more famous work such as Csikszentmihalyi (1975) proposes that leisure and work can both deliver pleasurable ‘flow’, although work often needs some careful restructuring. Some implications might arise for study skills programmes here – perhaps levels of risk ought to be increased for some students? 

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