Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

Forgot to mention the ones who are now missing out on job opportunities and internships because they haven't graduated or have to be available for resits in August. Obviously they are quite upset too!

I’m a Uni lecturer and couldn’t agree more. Join us in the Academic Common Room board!

My eldest was in Uni for a year and one semester and then came home. I think there is such an emphasis on the social aspect that Uni’s assume all teens are outgoing and and will get on with everyone. My eldest is sociable and has friends but they struggled with the people they were in halls with. They were loud parties night till dawn most days. My child ended up becoming mentally frail not quite depressed but so close that I think if they didn’t leave when they did they would not be here now.

I asked and asked time after time are you ok - then just before Xmas of their 2nd year I said you can always come home and find a job if don’t want to be at Uni.

they did, found work and has been working since and has recently moved out and now lives with a friend.

it takes all sots of people to make the world turn. But they need to be empowered and strong enough to say This is not for me - rather than trying to please the family/themselves because Uni seems to better option

I'm a mother of one of the sort of students you speak about and I agree with you. My DD (just finished 1st yr) has had access to some counselling support for the last few weeks and it's really helped during her 'acute' anxiety phases. I'm trying to continue this now to make sure that her coping strategies are in place and are practiced and also getting her to do things such as get a summer job etc, to try and push the envelope a bit. She's doing well so far.

Ah, but I'm not actually an academic, so I'd be a bit of an intruder! My actual role is academic/pastoral support, specifically with UG students, although quite a lot of it does focus on academic skills and study advice . I've been quite frustrated this year because we seem to be encouraging a culture where people defer because they don't think they're going to get a First. Achieving a First isn't feasible for everyone (certainly not in every assessment) and I feel that we shouldn't be encouraging a school of thought whereby anything less is a failure. Not to mention that it would be very detrimental to the institution's perceived academic integrity were everyone to get a First! But the majority of my immediate colleagues feel differently. (I know that thoughts among academic staff are quite different...)

I would say that with maybe 10% cases I've handled it was unquestionably better for the student to defer. In about 10% more cases I'd say it was 50-50. The remainder, the students would have probably done better to sit their assessments as scheduled.

I'm a lecturer and agree, I've seen it across glass plate and RG universities. The whole system has become needlessly medicalised. Yes, some students have crippling anxiety but most have exam nerves or worries that are completely normal.

As an employer of “high end” graduates I already feel that too many lack resilience, fortitude, and an understanding that deadlines and deliverables can often be set in stone; that you can’t fail to deliver one because you slept badly, have hay fever, or your grandmother died.

Allowing students to defer, resist, or being given other accommodations on too-flimsy grounds is doing them no favours in the long-run.

I’m trying to hire graduates at the moment, and this year abd last year’s cohort are like a different generation to the previous years. Some only want to work 4 days a week or from home full time. They aren’t willing to travel to our other offices…

Yes, yes, yes! I think I said that we were "pathologising exam nerves" or something similar, but colleagues reacted as if I'd said something heretical! Not to mention the endless 2 week extensions doled out for positive Covid tests (I doubt they were all incapacitated for 2 weeks). I cannot really mention the specifics of the situation which pissed me off most, but essentially we had worked extremely hard and set up a lot of support for one particular thing, only for it to get junked because "the world is in such a worrying state right now."

Completely with you. My university (also RG) has allowed students to award themselves extensions on virtually every piece of work since Covid. No reason needed or questions asked! Many of them now have never handed in a single piece of work on time. The number of pieces of unsubmitted work when we got to exam boards was unprecedented. Working to deadlines is a QAA benchmarked skill in my subject (and I’m sure in most others), so the university has set us up to fail to meet the course outcomes.

Now that we have online assignments instead of exam hall exams, the students are starting to demand extensions for these too. We’re trying to get our exams moved back into exam halls (mainly because of increased levels of cheating with online exams) but the squealing from the students is unreal, as if we are sending them into a war zone and condemning them to fatal levels of stress. I pity the employers who will actually be paying money for this level of apparent inability to deal with entirely normal expectations.

Also work in a university and completely agree.
I really object to the way that any sign of anxiety or feeling sad is now treated as a disability so that adjustments can be made.
(In my experience the pressure is from the students or occasionally the parents and then they battle to get academic / support staff onside).

We did actually go back to real life exams (this may be a giveaway to my place of work!) and the outrage was unreal. Thankfully the uni stuck to its guns and, surprisingly enough, nobody actually spontaneously combusted through stress. I do appreciate that it had been a long time for some of them but at the same time... they will have sat in-person exams virtually EVERY summer since they were 11 or 12. It's hardly something absolutely unknown to them.

I agree that removing the stressor rather than supporting people to develop coping strategies isn't helpful in a lot of cases, and that it can be detrimental.

Exams are inherently stressful, quite scary things. And that's OK! Deadlines can be stressful, but also motivating and often it's only under pressure that we actually see what we are capable of when we aren't given a choice in the matter.

Dare I say it that the stress transfers to the academics, (and of course academic support staff further down the line), who have much less time to mark with all the extensions?

We did actually go back to real life exams (this may be a giveaway to my place of work!) and the outrage was unreal. Thankfully the uni stuck to its guns and, surprisingly enough

My university is making it very difficult for us to return to exam halls. They don’t want to service them and prefer to dump the administrative burden on to departments.

Sorry but I disagree. The last 3 years have absolutely destroyed many young people’s mental health. There is precious little support and intervention available before crisis point. I say this as a parent who has spent the last year desperately fighting to get help for my dc whose anxiety tipped over into psychosis whilst at university during lockdown. We are lucky that we can afford private treatment, but even that has waiting lists of months, even for those in deep crisis. I know so many other young adults who were previously happy and healthy but are now struggling. Please offer what support you can, these circumstances are unprecedented.

I’m a HoD and have made it clear that my team can’t be expected to mark and moderate in a drastically reduced timeframe, especially given that moderation requires us to look at the work of a module group collectively. Of course, we then get students complaining that we’ve missed the deadline for returning their work, even when they submitted it a day before the feedback deadline.

I did a masters fairly recently and was amazed by the 'kid gloves' extended to students. Top of mind, no need to hunt down books in library. Librarian would do that for you. No.......

I also completely agree, OP. The last couple of years’ cohorts seem woefully un-resilient and university policy over Covid seems to have entrenched this massively. From in a unusual year having around 15-20 percent of students having some difficulty, now it’s quite literally the majority - easily 60 percent or more.

It’s incredibly worrying how easily management/pastors leads cave in and I’ve been basically told to give them exactly what they want, even when it’s clearly completely counterproductive. Now having to agree to allow emotional support animals and mums and Uncle Tom Cobley and all into teaching and exam sessions, automatic extensions for all even when I know it’s because no work has been done, and it’s frankly ridiculous.

I’m very sympathetic to hardship and adverse circumstances usually, but it cannot be the case that nearly all of the cohort is so debilitated by normal expectations that they can’t cope with basic and routine things that cohorts 2-3 years ago could manage no problem at all. No wonder recruiters are finding this graduating class difficult (as in another thread I’ve just seen) — they’ve basically been allowed by orients and university management to disintegrate to the point of absolute incompetence. It’s really concerning for the cohorts coming up behind them and yes, it does soak up absolutely masses of time and resources in pastoral and academic admin and support dealing with it all.

Orients? Bloody autocorrect! Parents.

No one is saying that students shouldn’t be given support. Of course they should. It’s the nature of the “support” that we’re calling into question. And, while these particular forms of “support” may have served a purpose during lockdowns, they have now become inappropriately normalised and are detrimental to students’ ability to move into the workplace or even complete their degrees,

One of the reasons we like Oxbridge graduates is the relatively brutal nature of the courses there, with all, or nearly all of the course marks coming at the end in a series of exams.

Yes, course work is in many ways more like work at the office, but anyone is capable of doing that when they need to. What makes the difference is understanding that the candidate has already demonstrated that under the most extreme stress they are able to deliver to a very high standard.

If people are hand-held, picked up every time it gets hard, allowed to try, retry, and try again, then how can we possibly know which ones have coping mechanisms that we’ll only get to see working in reality when it’s too late?

I completely agree with you and it’s a relief to hear someone say it. I often feel on a different planet to my colleagues with the pandering and softly softly approach needed. I’m a lecturer in a vocational health course (also RG uni and an academic course) and really feel we are setting up students to fail as when they graduate into the NHS no one will tolerate them not turning up to a shift ‘due to anxiety’ or not completing their mandatory training as they are ‘having a bad day’.
I think I’m seen as a harsh academic advisor- I’ll offer support and referral to counselling etc and of course help with genuine need but often ask students to reflect whether the career path is for them if they can’t hack handing an assignment in on time with no good reason not to. I’ve worked here 4 years and I’ve noticed that’s got considerably worse recently.

I’m very sorry to hear about your DC — psychosis is an acute illness and needs huge amounts of support. For the very few in that situation we have the utmost sympathy.

However it really isn’t the case that most of the students are experiencing problems that acute — for most of mine, it’s mild anxiety and a general hysteria around doing exams in person, meeting deadlines, completing work, and so on. (And these are kids who I know are well off, well supported by parents, every accommodation has been made during the pandemic. Indeed, during the pandemic I was often homeschooling plus teaching 80 hours a week on Zoom with acute RSI and huge amounts of stress and additional marking pressures, in a corner of my tiny flat surrounded by laundry, whilst they zoom from large, tidy, well-appointed bedrooms with mum and dad popping in to deliver cups of tea!) (In contrast, universities have done almost nothing to assist staff stress and overwork during Covid - my manager didn’t even bother speaking to me once during the whole pandemic, and there was absolutely zero attempt to mitigate the stress staff were under).

Obviously not every student is in a well-supported position at all. I tend to find though that the ones who ask for the most accommodations are not actually the ones who tend to have the most challenging circumstances. As I said above, there are always a small percentage of students who need mental health support for very genuine reasons. But an additional fifty percent or more with generalised anxiety about routine things like handing in a paper to deadline, or completing a week’s reading of a few articles? I’m very sympathetic to the pressures of the pandemic, but this does seem to go well beyond what one would expect.

It’s not at all like your DC’s experience which is of a different level entirely. I really hope that they can find help and support to recover

Completely agree with you, OP.