Some of this might be from his Oxford background -<p>Oxford and Cambridge have a very strong culture of small-group tuition, where the tutor (&quot;supervisor&quot;) has an enormous amount of freedom. And students typically have end-of year exams -- everything up until that is formative.<p>If you look at it from a semester course-by-course system&#x27;s perspective it would seem very strangely designed. But Oxford and Cambridge&#x27;s pedagogy is very effective at producing independently-minded, creative, and somewhat fearless students, who &quot;get&quot; the subject matter.<p>And there is quite a lot of research elsewhere supporting the effectiveness of small group tutoring (which might go a long way to explaining why the Oxbridge teaching style works as well as it does there).<p>So when you say that in his first semester, he gave a great deal of independence to the TAs, especially in small-group discussions, and gave students freedom for all the mid-term testing to be just formative if they wish, that sounds to me as if perhaps he was experimenting with bringing some of what he valued about Oxford&#x27;s teaching practice to Berkeley.