Scottish education system vs. American education system

Back in December, I read an interesting article in the NY Times about how many American students are opting to begin their undergrad careers overseas, since the cost to attend at private university is much lower than in the U.S. Scotland's prestigious universities at St. Andrew's and yes, Edinburgh! were heavily included in the piece, as was how their education systems differed from the states. Here, students specialize in a degree fairly early and are not expected to take a wide range of liberal arts classes. It also mentioned how Scottish universities expect students to know where they're headed and to be "intellectually independent," according to the article.

Well as my semester draws to a close, I can report that this article is pretty accurate. There are few assignments - I wrote four essays for three classes during the semester - but they are heavily weighted in my final grade. (Two of the essays were worth 40 percent; the other two were each worth 25 percent.) Professors here, like the article mentioned, don't provide much feedback. I'm been attempting to study for my final exams, which are clumped together toward the end of the exam period, and frankly I'm not exactly sure what to study for some of them. For two of my classes, they did provide some guidance for what to expect, yet for my Scottish history class, they more or less are feeding us to the wolves. My only hope is studying for the next few weeks will hopefully provide me some kind of background knowledge to bullshit my way to a C. I'm not expecting my grades to be all that extraordinary, (I mean I know I'm not going to be a social worker or a Scottish historian) - I just hope I pass all my classes with some semblance of grades that don't embarrass me.