WSET Diploma: Just How Hard is It?
Just How Hard Is It? Part 1: Time Commitment
WSET is close lipped about success rates, but it seems that, every year, thousands start and hundreds finish. Why don’t more finish? Most often, I suspect, it’s because at some point during the two-year (and often considerably longer) process, people decide that it just demands too much time.
Having a good experience at levels 2 and 3 can be a bit misleading. In those programs, the workload is manageable and the pass rates are pretty high. If you take it seriously, merit or distinction grades are reasonably achievable. I don’t mean to diminish the amount of work required, however, especially at level 3. These are serious programs requiring hard work.
But if you think about the size of the step-up in commitment from level 2 to level 3, then the Diploma isn’t level 4. It’s about level 10. The level 3 book is 200 pages long, while the Diploma materials are >1100 pages. Whereas the level 3 exam lasts 2.5 hours, the Diploma exams last almost 12 hours, not including the 3000 word research paper.
The Funniest Thing WSET Ever Said
There isn’t a lot of humor in the Diploma materials. This is serious business, and it’s an expert qualification. But, once you have finished, you can go back and take one last look at the Specification. Your reward will be a laugh-out-loud funny moment.
It comes in the section about the estimated time required to complete the Diploma. The “guided learning,” i.e., classes, etc., is a set amount of time (quite a bit). But then comes the howler. They say that a candidate would “reasonably need” 372 hours of private study time.
If you do the math, that’s about half an hour a day for two years, or 3.5 hours a week. That sounds pretty manageable. But, if you’ve been through the Diploma, it actually sounds impossible.
Think about it. 1100 densely-packed pages of required text. The big hurdle, D3, covers about 80 wine regions and >150 “essential” wines. With the allocated 170 hours of study time for D3 divided in half for theory and tasting, you can spend all of ~1 hour on each region. Can you read the materials, write notes, and memorize virtually everything about Bordeaux — to Diploma standard — in an hour?
Can’t be done. At least if you’re not a speed reader with a photographic reading and tasting memory.
Bottom Line: Much more than a half an hour a day. One of my instructors said that he studied two hours a day for two years. We are all different, but that sounds closer to reality to me. I don’t think I spent two hours every day, but I certainly made up for it when exams were coming up. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you should know from the start what it’s going to take to make it to the finish.
Don Drakeman, DipWSET