Does DD have any recourse with uni?

[Lismore]

Any legal thoughts very welcome….

DD should be graduating next week.

She sat 4 exams and did a dissertation for her finals and has received great marks in all except for one.

Due to the latest industrial action by lecturers, the fifth paper will not be marked until October at the earliest and possibly not at all (the uni has mooted that last year’s mark could be used instead).

She is so disappointed. They are planning to go ahead with a graduation ceremony but students won’t know their class of degree.

One overseas student she knows will have visa problems due to requiring a 2.i for a job offer.

After three years of disruption from lecturers (every year of her degree) and then COVID this feels like the final straw.

Does the uni have any contractual obligation to provide marked papers and a degree class by a certain time after the student sits their finals?

I honestly feel like encouraging her to do a class action or similar.

I have no idea - my son is in the same position and although applying for jobs in the UK is probably ok (UK firms understand it’s out of students’ control) he wants a job in Paris and I think it’s going to be a problem.

My daughter and her whole cohort graduated yesterday without grades! It’s so unfair.

Write to the vice chancellors of their universities!

Tell the universities to pay a decent wage.

Your DD’s university will have a complaints procedure - Google the name of the university and ‘student complaints’ or look in the course handbook. Take careful note of the deadlines - a lot of procedures require the complaint to be submitted within 28 days of the matter occurring. Use the procedure to submit a complaint about the impact of the delay - e.g if this has prevented your DD taking a job offer, state this and provide evidence where possible. If you remain dissatisfied with the outcome it will be possible to escalate the complaint to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator who are the ombudsman for uni complaints once you have exhausted the uni’s procedures.

Yes you can do a class action or write to the vice chancellor, but the student complaints procedure is the correct pathway to take.

@Gilead My ex is a lecturer and he is paid well, good benefits and lots of annual leave compared to most of us. He doesn't strike, he's marked all his students.

He never gets sympathy from me that his excellent pension isn't quite as excellent as 10 years ago when most of us barely get anything these days.

You could take them to small claims?

That’s nice but for those who are newer the pay is grim computing the amount of time and effort put in.
£30 000 pa is not easy in any city.

The correct thing to do is to use their complaints and/or appeals procedure. But this is a no-win situation. Different universities have taken different approaches and ultimately, students aren't happy with any of them. Reweighting / rescaling obviously disadvantages some. Employing alternative markers has also caused a lot of pushback, especially where the students can tell their work has been marked by a "non-specialist". Allowing students to be awarded their degree with marks/ratification pending, likewise.

Any action, whether through the university routes or external legal action, will be dealt with by admin/regulation teams before going before appeals board and so on. The people handling those cases will be sympathetic and diligent, but have no real means to challenge either industrial action or university policy. Ultimately, no one can prohibit individuals from taking part in industrial action, and many universities are deducting pay quite heavily from those who participated in the boycott over the past couple of months.

It would be nice if those who complain would consider that the people who are actually handling the complaints are taking flack and pressure from all sides in this dispute.

My daughter is in the same boat with Cardiff Uni. She has all the results bar 1. They’re all either 2:1 or 1st yet she will graduate this week with a pass.

She/we are not anti the MAB but the way the uni have chosen to deal with it is poor. She could graduate with a 2:1 based on the results she does have. The final mark could push her into a 1st so the result could be reclassified at a later date.

@Kirova you are in an unenviable position, but equally, do you expect the graduates affected by this to just shrug their shoulders and wait patiently? DD contacted Cardiff’s ‘helpline’ (as touted by the VC in his official statement’ last Thursday. Was told she would hear back within 48 hours. Yesterday she called again having heard nothing and got a message saying the office is shut until after 24 July.

It would be nice if those who deal with the complaints would consider that the people actually making the complaints have effectively had their lives put on hold through no fault of their own and are just trying to find answers.

I work in an Irish university. I am so sorry for the students affected here. As much as I sympathise with university staff, I think this has been unacceptable for students who already have been through so much disruption.

Well, I think that's unacceptable - the lack of access to information and guidance, particularly if students have been told they will have access to it. I can't comment on any institution other than the one I work in, but I know that in our case we have written to very large numbers of prospective employers and institutions where students will be going for further study - both in general terms and bespoke comms for individual students. It's taking longer to deal with the complaints because of the volume, and even if the uni hires agency staff to assist (which many are doing) it takes time for them to be apprised of the regulations and intricacies of the situation so that they can handle the complaints appropriately.

@Kirova thank you for explaining this so well - I work in a university complaints team, and as you suggest I have no direct influence on the industrial action. It’s going to be a really tough summer for my team.

Thats awful to be stuck because of the strike. The least the universities could do is mark the exams and work and let the students know their grades. The students have paid for their courses. Is there anything about strike action in the payment contract?

@IBparent I feel for your daughter and all students caught up in this, but ultimately any complaint about the impact cannot be fully addressed until the MAB ended, because that’s the point at which the full impact on upon daughter will be known. If I handled your daughter’s complaint now and offered financial compensation, the compensation could only be for the period up to today’s date. If the MAB goes on until October I assume that the impact on your daughter will be greater, so better to assess the complaint at that point to fully understand the impact. The uni complaints team do not have the power to demand that work is marked immediately (it’s a sector- wide strike that goes far wider than one uni or subject) so this isn’t a potential outcome of the complaints process.

I am fortunate that Dc is only in year 2 but part of a module consisting of the exam and an assignment completed over the Easter "holidays" has just been thrown out, it will never be marked. Rather than giving everyone the standard 2:1 mark which the paper is aimed at, they just disregarded it. Dc is pissed because they like a lot of the other students on that course all did fairly poorly (for them) on another component in that module so spent more time on this assignment and exam revision than other modules because they wanted to pull their grades up a few points. This non-marking meant that weighting was sadly given more heavily to the one part that they all as a cohort did more poorly on pulling their overall grade down. This all counts toward their final grade. They have been given some grades and a 2nd year grade which could go up or down depending on whether more second year work is marked at the start of year 3. This is a uni in the top 10 and as parents we are appalled.

It is a complete shit show with people "graduating" with no actual grades, some because they have lecturers who didn't strike have had all their work marked and have graduated with grades. People are worried about jobs because graduate jobs require a 1st or 2:1. I think the whole situation of striking which has affected my child who was tested on work they were not taught, and not marking work that either gives final year students their grade or work that counts towards their final grade like Dc in year 2 is disgusting behaviour.

I feel so desperately sorry for this cohort of students. The education system has completely screwed them over.

Your child will be able to appeal the reweighting. I don't personally love reweighting as a solution, but it's a means to allow the student to progress. I can appreciate that they want to know their results for this year, but there is plenty of time for discrepancies to be addressed before their final degree classification is calculated. However, if they sit tight, it might well be that the unmarked assessment component ends up being graded at some point and their module mark adjusted to reflect it.

The situation has nothing to do with whether or not an institution is 'top 10'; it's really just about how many lecturers have participated in the MAB. This can vary within institutions, department to department.

@SOWK you have my sympathies! I had to really distance myself from it a bit over the last few weeks. A lot of the submissions and meetings are very charged and emotive and it's easy to get a bit sucked into the crisis atmosphere! I hope your summer is better than expected, but I suspect it will be a full-on period...

Small claims is for money claims of up to £10k. So even if you do manage to prove you are £10k out of pocket, and win, you still don’t have a degree.

I think the NUS might be organising a group action, may be worth looking into

The lecturers have a legal right to strike.

Yes but the universities should also mitigate the impact, rather than saying "nothing to do with us". A strike of your own workforce is absolutely to do with you.

My son is in his second year so not affected by the degree classification debacle but he only has half his results for the second year.

I also think that a marking boycott which prevents students graduating is a little more than just a strike. Refusing to mark day to day work or do lectures is very different.

I'd be surprised if any university has said that. I think all institutions have tried to mitigate, but realistically, any form of mitigations will always please some better than others.