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.

Yes I agree. Deadlines need to be deadlines and exams need to be sat, else a student shouldn’t be awarded a degree.

I think people are failing to understand that the impact of lockdowns is not the same across age groups. Experiencing it as an adult, with your skills and way of life (however easy or hard that is) established is emphatically not the same as experiencing it at a formative developmental period like adolescence. You cannot put developing people into the deep freeze and expect them to be normal when defrosted. Comparing it to wartime is silly; most young people in wartime had activity, occupation, society - in many ways wider opportunities than peacetime afforded.

I think there is something in this and it does make me very uncomfortable that we, in universities, are effectively entrenching middle class privilege by mollycoddling students and protecting them from things that their peers who don’t go to university have to either get with or face the consequences. Similarly, the supposed mental health crisis in universities, of which much has been made in the media, is never discussed in the context of that age group as a whole, for which there is a higher suicide rate amongst 18-21 year olds not at university. There is a lot of classism and privilege about the university system that goes beyond the provision of education itself.

I agree with the premise of the first post, which I think is basically that deferments and extensions are not constructive in many cases (in my case, my final year deferment and retake was extremely helpful and allowed me to graduate with a 2:1). Deferments though can just push the problem into the future without actually putting in place the beginnings of an actual solution.

However, much of the remainder of the thread has turned into young people are bad these days and you MUST sit coursework and exams in THIS specific way to be deserving of a degree. This is hilarious to me.

Older generations always say that the younger generations are lazy etc. Your parents and grandparents generation definitely said this about you. It's never, ever true. Human beings are always pretty much the same as what came before them!

Yes, it's uni staffs fault for expecting students to actually study and do their work. How dare they? Give all the poor little poppets another extension.

You're not helping them you know. You're part of the problem

@TullyApplebottom Although I agree with the general gist of what you are saying, students are young adults. And many school students had only part-time school during the war - morning or afternoon - and no university places. And those who had left school were conscripted to fight. There were no more opportunities except for women who had been housewives.

However, much of the remainder of the thread has turned into young people are bad these days and you MUST sit coursework and exams in THIS specific way to be deserving of a degree. This is hilarious to me

Well, thats how a degree works. You do have to do the coursework and exams, of you don't get one. If you can't, you are not deserving of a degree

It’s as though they are living in a different world.

Older generations always say that the younger generations are lazy etc. Your parents and grandparents generation definitely said this about you. It's never, ever true. Human beings are always pretty much the same as what came before them!

But there are academics on here with twenty or thirty years’ experience of teaching undergraduate students who can objectively recognise the change within that period. Hell, you can even see it within the space of five or seven years.

Well, thats how a degree works. You do have to do the coursework and exams, of you don't get one. If you can't, you are not deserving of a degree

Yes, you do have to DO them, that's not what I said. The methods change. I don't think 100 years ago people would have sat online coursework for a degree! ;)

I would be interested on the opinions of the university employees on here about this thread about degrees being easy.

However, much of the remainder of the thread has turned into young people are bad these days and you MUST sit coursework and exams in THIS specific way to be deserving of a degree. This is hilarious to me.

Do you not understand how a degree works, or have one yourself?

Yes, of course that’s how they work. You must do the course work, and you must sit the exams, at the time the university tells you, and do both to a sufficient standard to get the degree.

Conceivably your degree is fashion from Bournemouth, where just registering at some point gets you the certificate, but real degrees require that you show your understanding of the subject to a required degree and in the proscribed manner.

this is an interesting thread.

when my mother died two weeks into my final year at university (father already deceased) I asked my director of studies how much time I could take off. He informed me (probably more gently than I heard it) that there were minimum requirements for the course, and if I missed assessments and more than a couple of essential seminars I would really need to defer for the year. At the time it felt very harsh and uncompassionate to hear, but with hindsight I can see where he was coming from. I did return after a couple of weeks, and although there were rocky times I managed (god bless low contact hours humanities courses).

Obviously this isn't to say that no accommodations or adjustments should be made, but I guess there's a grey area where if ever more accommodations and adjustments are needed you need to think if the job/course is something you can manage right now. It must be pretty stressful in and of itself to be constantly seeking adjustments and feeling that you can't manage, and stepping back to reflect might help some.

I agree with you. It is because the media largely report the concerns of the middle-class. So nobody really cares about working-class kids not at university killing themselves. Sad but true.
And some of the people who suffered most during lockdowns were the most disadvantaged. Children and adults with very complex disabilities who did not get any usual therapies, no respite for carers, nothing. But few cared.

It is interesting someone mentioning about gay men who were killed during the AIDS crisis. It surprises me when talking to young people how little they know about recent history. That lesbian and gay people were still being put in mental hospitals as recently as 40 - 50 years ago. How single mothers really were treated like the scum of the earth. When people talk about my generation being privileged, they mean a certain demographic of my generation.

So, your final sentence isn’t true. For young people who joined the services, they had access to opportunities and responsibility well beyond what young people of their age would have had in normal times. I had such people in my family and you probably did too. But the salient point is that whatever the hardships of war, they did not generally involve deprivation of important developmental experience. And lockdown did.

You are being very dishonest now. No-one is saying that appraisal methods don’t change, they are saying that failing to comply with them now as they currently are is a problem.

Do you have an actual point to add here or are you just trying to ruin a decent thread by pretending not to understand the points that people are making?

But the salient point is that whatever the hardships of war, they did not generally involve deprivation of important developmental experience. And lockdown did

They involved the actual deprivation of LIFE ITSELF, which is more of a big deal than your kidnot getting freshers week.

These posts are insane

Yes, you do have to DO them, that's not what I said. The methods change. I don't think 100 years ago people would have sat online coursework for a degree! ;)

The reason that many academics want to return to traditional exams is because the online assessments (which were never set up because they were pedagogically sound, but from necessity during the pandemic) have resulted in high levels of cheating which it is all but impossible for us to circumvent. Traditional exams may pose a rather artificial scenario but they have the advantage that your native-speaking mother can’t sit your language test for you, or you can’t use an essay mill, or collude with your classmates or get someone who took the module last year to help you.

Andy, @bruffin

I’m always interested in how the effects of both world wars still filter down the generations. And especially for women.

And I was a teenager when equal pay for women was finally legislated(not that we have it). There are a lot of things about working and social arrange which are far far better for this generation of graduates than they were for me, or my mother’s and grandmother’s generations.

Im technically a baby boomer although I was born right at the end of the 50s. But opportunities and wealth etc were/are still a matter of class and also geographic location. A lot of the filthy lucre of the swinging sixties never made it north of London and certainly not into the north west were I was brought up. Quite reverse - it was an area of de-industrialisation even before Thatchers deliberate policies to wreak havoc on the North.

They involved trauma. Seeing your friends die in horrible ways and risk being killed or injured.
Soldiers did see other countries. But young adults then generally had more responsibility than young people now.

Agree, not Andy! My phone hates me!

Some people did lose their lives, yes; most didn’t and continued to live active lives during wartime.
the point isn’t about which was worse and which was better; the point is the experiences, for this age group, are not comparable. So saying « wartime generation had it worse » is a daft argument. The point for the covid generation is they have been deprived of developmental opportunities. It is not surprising therefore if they gave not developed optimally.

Bloody hell I think the wartime generation had it worse, especially if they were adults.
I knew a number of men who had pain or problems as a result of wartime injuries or torture. And many had nightmares for decades. The current generation could not cope with what they went through. And it is beyond ridiculous to suggest they did not have it harder than the current generation.

Fair enough. How about getting back to fully face to face lectures, seminars, working groups, etc which is what the majority of students want? Or does it only work one way?

It’s hard to understand the insanity of some posts on here. Yours in particular.

To claim that having to do some of your studying at home and not see your friends is so not worse than being forced to leave home, get into a troop ship, and then get out to kill or be killed as you fight your way across a foreign country far from everyone and everything you love while your family back home are bombed or starved is imbecilic.