Well-worn themes were the documentary-style video, particularly the talking-head interview variety; the "working studio" installation, sometimes complete with self-conscious student at work; the fairly large (presumably intentional) bad painting, and , conversely, the barely-there squiggly little doodle on paper; the "interactive" work (free lunch, ping pong, etc.); the mind-bogglingly repetitive ten-thousand-circles-drawn-in-biro type affair.

In all this variety, there is one unifying trend: presentation. More and more effort is going into making degree shows look like gallery exhibitions. In my own experience, a large part of preparing our show involved cleaning, filling, sanding, paiting floors and walls (white walls repainted white to look, well, even whiter), procuring expensive frames, video projectors and the exact monitors, and all this before you even get on to making the actual work. Long gone are the days when a student would shove a broom round the studio and plonk their work in a prominent position. This is showbusiness.

But why? Has art simply become a consumer durable? Maybe there's a bit of that, but my theory is that this is the legacy of Charles Saatchi and the YBA phenomenon. Style-wise, the shock tactics of Damien Hirst and Co are very much out of fashion now, but the ambition and drive of that generation of artists has been passed on. Teenagers no longer go to art college to smoke dope and form a band. The final-year show has become a platform on which to display your professionalism as well as your artistry, and this has led to increasingly elaborate and expensive productions.

In the past I've found the Slade show fairly big and brash, but undoubtedly the greatest excesses this year come from the sculpture departments of Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. Here the sculptures tower over me at 12ft or more, and the installations are walk-in environments. These students might not be able to carve bodies out of marble, but they could put together a small theme-park with the skills they've acquired in project managament and organisation of funds. One student has been negotiating sponsorship deals of up to £250,000 to install a 34 ft racing boat in the forecourt of Chelsea College's Millbank site. And the show's only open for a week.

You can practically smell the ambitious competitiveness of these works, but, for me, the ideas often seem small and overwhelmed. These are young artists trying to make the work of someone far more advanced in their career. Like a rock band recording its bloated over-produced fourth album when it should be recording snappy four-track demos.

Another problem with the emphasis on presentation is that it's modelled on the money-spinning world of up-market galleries, where costs are easily offset by massive sales. However, the same cannot be said of an average art-student budget, leading many to spend beyond their means. A friend of mine was eating one meal a day to save on expenses during the last weeks of the course. Another's landlord turned up at our degree show wanting to collect over-due rent. Yet both of these student spent well over £1,000 on the production of their final pieces of work. Neither has yet been sold. By contrast, only one brave soul in our college dared to buck the trend and present his video on one of the battered old 12in monitors provided by the college for everyday use. He even put it in a store-room on the ninth floor, with the college's plastic chairs serving as audience seating and a hand-written note Sellotaped to the wall indicating screening times. I found myself really admiring Oscar Carlson's bare-bones approach to presentation, and in this case it paid off. The examiners graded him in the top 5 per cent of our year for his video The Artist in Paris. It's a smart and funny piece using Godard-style black-and-white imagery and it looks great even on a small screen. It was a breath of fresh air.

All this left me convinced that slick professionalism and a few sales do not an artist make. I didn't go to college to sell pictures that compliment the furniture. I know thousands of pounds of sponsorship can't buy me a good idea. It might sound naff, but, for me, art allows for a way of thinking about life that goes beyond the (let's face it, crass) obsessions with status and ownership typical of a lot of talk in and about the "art world". As Hirst remarked (and he should know): "Art and the art world are two totally seperate things. The art world is all about money. Art is about life."