Marking & Assessment Boycott

[aridapricot]

So how do you think this will pan out this time? Are you taking part? How do you think things will go in your university/department?
My uni is docking 30% pay. Also in my department (where the spirit tends to be "yes we'll do whatever UCU asks us to do but we'll also go out of our way to cause any inconvenience to students") people are already talking about mitigations... 🙄I am not a UCU member and won't be taking part but I also fear that at some point I will be asked to cover colleague's marking or (even worse) redistribute it (given that I'm HoD).

Students will progress to the next year in the practical sense but there might be in-year resits is my best guess.

Yes, my institution was in the MAB last year and this is what we did. Double exams for some students and extra work for staff, especially professional services. The institution barely broke sweat.

Why would there be resits when the students have done the work? Or is this for assessments that were not set due to the MAB?

I'm not in UCU any more, and luckily (for me) hardly anyone in my faculty is still a member because our local branch is one of the more dire, so I can mark without sabotaging anyone's industrial action. My university is on 50% deductions, but I wonder how that's going to work when the boycott is lifted. Will people get their 50% refunded? If not, why would they ever do the missing marking? I can't see how it's going to work.

Add to that, that people who are not currently taking industrial action are saying that they won’t be undertaking the moderating, double marking, etc, that they were expecting to do now, in the autumn or at any other subsequent point as that will impact their workload. I agree, a lot of marking is never going to get done.

Why should they sit exams that they have already sat, I can’t see that working. I suspect they will just be awarded marks based on whatever seems easiest to administrate.

The UCEA are being ridiculous and J suspect the Universities just think that it will peter out . Poor students, the same ones who had the A level debacle and the new GCSEs. I hope they take legal action against the universities.

I think it’s more that students will progress regardless of whether it’s known if they would have passed at the time of progression. If the paper is then marked and the student has passed, then all’s well. But if it turns out that the student hasn’t passed and it’s now too late to administer a resit exam, the resit will have to be taken at the same time as the exams for the year the student has progressed into.

This is assuming that the papers are actually marked at some point. I also don’t know what would happen if the student fails the resit and is also in their final year.

Yes, sorry, that's exactly what I meant. If they do not pass, and have no extenuating circumstances that would grant them an uncapped resit, they will resit (at some point?) capped at 40. If they passed in the first place, they definitely don't need to do the exam again.

The two problems of this approach are:
(a) some modules are core i.e., considered essential for the degree to be accredited and/or need to have been passed in order for the student to progress to the next year. For example, a 2nd year stats or research methods module that must have been passed in order for the student to be considered capable of undertaking their 3rd year dissertation. So students will move to the next year when ordinarily they would not have been permitted to.
(b) students - often some of those that struggle most - will be doing resit prep at the same time as working towards modules at the next level up.

I'm a HoD who left the Union some time ago. I don't agree with this MAB at all. I'd have had some sympathy if it had excluded Finalists, but in all conscience I can't think of the Department as a place where we put students first, if I support this. And I'm afraid I've done a little bit of extra marking as well. I've wrestled hard with my conscience about it, but when it gets down to the wire, the students come first in my book. This cohort has had an incredibly difficult time from beginning to end and now they risk having their graduation day ruined as well. I won't be a part of that.

I am in your exact same position @Annasoror (by the way great name!). I thought that the university's decision to allow students to graduate with missing grades, without obviously solving the dispute, would be seen with sympathy by students UCU members (who in many cases do hate to inflict this disruption on students), since this avoids the worst type of disruption (students not getting their degrees). Like you, I did some extra marking, as little as I was able to get away with so that students could graduate. Now no one is happy: students blame me for their missing grades and claim that my marking is not that of an "expert" (expertise doesn't seem to bother them when they insist on writing UG dissertations on "cool" topics that no one in the department has the first clue about, but anyway), colleagues (understandably) think that we shouldn't have graduated anyone.

I understand tempers seem to be fraying at our local institution , things seem to be getting much more heated , unsurprisingly I suppose , its all so sad

Yes, definitely the MAB has been much nastier than the usual form of industrial action. There have been HoDs openly crying in meetings at my place. It's pretty intolerable being stuck between people who are targeting their action at you, students and the institution - and then to be expected to show up at graduation and deal with furious parents . . .

Mmm. Nobody should be aggressive or personal about this. Striking or not striking can both be principled positions. So v sorry if anyone is being treated badly.

But I don't believe heads of department are any more stuck than anyone else. They can strike too. Or not. There's more disruption in our place due to middle managers vacillating (understandably) than anything else. If they would either embrace the action and strike, or follow instructions and deal with it, we would be well out of the woods by now, since other managers would step in

Not my circus but there's something to be said for having the courage of your convictions. Whatever the convictions.

You don't even have to be in UCU or any union to participate in this action.

I'm a secondary school teacher but can I ask a question please? I often see on Twitter lecturers saying things like "I only get 5 minutes paid to mark an essay" or similar.
How is this worked out?
As a teacher, I get paid for 1265 directed hours a week, but marking isn't even included in that, it's just the additional duties that are expected of me to complete my job.
In this line of work, pay usually isn't calculated hourly i thought?

A lot of university teaching staff are on casual contracts, hence paid by the hour. This is part of the basis for the dispute.

We had a seven hour online exam board this week.

Two senior members of staff cried.

One of the deans was brought in for the last couple of hours to explain/give context. This was a dumb idea and inflamed the situation much, much more. Some staff made noises about feeling "unsafe" with his presence. The branch secretary -who's on sabbatical - appeared once he heard the dean was present and gave him a massive earful. It was unprofessional, rude and embarrassing.

I've heard on the grapevine that this kind of behaviour - lots of which comes from my heavily-unionised department - is making the university dig their heels in deeper.

But that's what a lot of my UCU colleagues want. The want continuous action, open-ended strikes because its part of their cosplaying at being 1980s miners. Solidarity and all that.

I think this MAB has been hugely detrimental to the working atmosphere in universities. I hear colleagues saying they will never trust other colleagues again because of behaviour at exam boards etc. I'm on a university committee dealing with policy and regulations and we are constantly having requests for exemptions and special circumstances for different programmes. It's making for very fractious committee meetings

As well as many of us being casually employed, and thus able to see exactly the rate of pay to number of things to mark many departments have workload models which use calculations set by the university of time to do a task, these are shared publically in the dept. My dept aims to keep everyone working at between 100 and 110% of their workload allocation but many work over that. And as those figure wildly underestimate the time it takes to do basically all the things, we end up doing lots of unpaid work that is completely unacknowledged. Marking is a particularly clear example of this, as its very clear that to mark and comment usefully on a 5,000 word essay requires more than 15/20 minutes.

As a teacher, I get paid for 1265 directed hours a week, but marking isn't even included in that, it's just the additional duties that are expected of me to complete my job.

I'm assuming that figure 1265 is your total annual hours?

At my university, I'm workload is calculated on the basis of 1650 hours per annum. That includes teaching, research and administrative duties.

My contract is a standard 'Teaching & research' contract, in which I'm supposed to spend at least a third of my time undertaking original research. I have a monetary target each year for achieving external research grant funds.

I generally work around 50-60 hours a week and very rarely can I use up all my annual leave ... So academics on permanent contracts have to balance multiple roles & demands.

Those on hourly paid contracts are expected to deliver prepared teaching and teaching, and marking, on a paid by the hour basis. However, the payment isn't "Bill us for the time it takes you." VLs are paid a set amount.

At my place, VLs are paid for 3 hours, for every 1 hour face to face. So a standard taught module of 3 hours per week over 12 weeks, would be an allowance of hours of 108 hours (36 face to face + 72 prep/marking), plus maybe an hour a fortnight as an office hour for student consultations. But if you're marking 20 x 3,000 word essays, with a couple of paragraphs of composed & constructive feedback expected, that will take waaaaay more than the time you're paid for. I'm a very experienced academic, but a 3,000 word essay generally takes me around 30 minutes to mark properly.

https://twitter.com/ProfJamieC/status/1671781290285096961

... And then everybody clapped.

What a self-indulgent tweet. And the replies, saying they’ll do it too.

I think this MAB has been hugely detrimental to the working atmosphere in universities.

I agree MAB is more divisive than strikes ever were, and I wonder whether UCU factored that in as a reason for choosing this type of action. While morale at universities isn't great at the best of times, it is clear to me by now that the longer the dispute goes on the more likely it is that trust will break within departments and services making it very difficult to go back to a respectful, productive atmosphere.

Agree with this. Two HoDs at my place have had colleagues shouting at them in their offices because they feel the HoD isn't being supportive enough of MAB. One of the department managers was crying following a pre-board because she felt so under attack. Department and central PS staff are working ridiculous hours to try and ensure students can progress and graduate. They all get paid a heck of a lot less than the academic staff and they're rapidly running out of patience.

Department and central PS staff are working ridiculous hours to try and ensure students can progress and graduate. They all get paid a heck of a lot less than the academic staff and they're rapidly running out of patience.

That's absolutely true. Every time I ask my staff anything assessment-related I profusely apologize, they are under so much pressure, not only getting paid less but also getting f*ck all recognition in terms of career progression.

I completely agree re PS staff - isn't Unison balloting it's members too? I always think union action should be joined up to avoid shunting academic work onto PS colleagues