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.

What a fascinating post. You have made me think. I have all the symptoms of ADD - hopelessly scatty despite years of best intentions. I am unable to create any sensible routines eg alwasy putting keys were I can find them, unable to finish things, unable to retain any verbal information, it has to be written down or it may as well not exist. Etc. I even missed an A level exam because I forgot it was on, so got a D instead of predicted A. I was a nightmare, but managed to get to Oxford on the strength of the one subject I was good at. Struggled while there, had a breakdown, took time off, came back, managed a 2.1. I had no support from anyone at any time. No one ever intervened to suggest I even needed a therapist or medication. I look back and think I would have flourished so much better if I had had parents or teachers or lecturers or SEN support staff who noticed and put some support in place.

I've limped through life ever since, underachieving, being in debt, unable to hold down a full time job. And yet... I have a great marriage, great kids, a job I adore that pays very well by the hour - I just can't manage many hours. Maybe support wouldn't have helped after all. I don't know. Autistic ADHD DS gets offered plenty of support and only takes some of it, but I try hard to teach him things aged twenty that I learned by accident some time in my fifties, so that life isn't quite such a car crash for him. And I see him using this advice in his daily life to great effect.

@MsFrenchie - yes!

Until really recently students seemed to be really pleased to be able to get to our course and enjoy the teaching and the intellectual experience. Now the mindset is more like: they resent us for trying to provide the very experience they applied saying they wanted to do.

I also think that competitive/comparitive generational suffering is just the other side of the same coin. WW2 conscripts (and all who experienced it) existed within an entirely different psychosocial economy. The physical horror and the scale of privations were appalling, but there was a baseline of humanity and a sense of its interconnectedness (leading to the postwar consensus) which was a protective factor. The age of anxiety has none of that. It's the inversion of that, in fact.

This is a very interesting thread.
OP - do you think that the Unconditional Offer system that some Unis offer some students for some courses has a role to play in this?
I could see how a student knowing that they don't need to work hard for their A level to get their place, could come to university expecting the same free ride when they got there. Do you see any correlation between students expecting accommodations and those who get unconditional offers?

When you say 85% of autistic students 'don't work' do you mean never hand in their assigments or fail to find employment later on?

@TullyApplebottom what formative experiences did they miss out on that previous generations had?

One of the most interesting threads I have read on Mumsnet. Read several posts to my lecturer DH who nodded in complete agreement.

I think it an excellent idea to set a 2 hour exam and give ALL candidates up to 3 hours to complete it. The system of 25% additional time has been widely abused and in my experience gives a huge advantage to pupils at private school.

I am really concerned about the way some young people assume any uncomfortable feeling means that they have a “condition” which requires accommodation and even medical intervention. A small proportion definitely do require that but not the majority.

I agree with every word of your posts, @Jourdain11

That’s not a serious question, is it?
adolescent brains are developing. While my adolescent brain was developing I went to school, did drama and sport with friends, did exams, got a job, went on holiday, went to university where I met and socialised with a wide group of people, did drama, politics and sport, did my work …
all of that stopped during lockdown. The developing adolescent brains were cut off from all those opportunities. Do you think you can just flick a switch and gave them return to normal?

@WinterDeWinter, a healthcare professional from the Office for Students with Disabilities attends our Mitigating Circumstances panels and offers input to the MH cases.

To the parents of students with real MH problems, including Anxiety Disorders, I don’t see your DC’s disability being dissed here. Most of the Personal Tutors in my School as well as our Academic Support Officer (similar to the OP, I think) are happy to work with your children. In theory so is the Counselling Service but in practice I’ve never heard anything good about it. Grossly underfunded, but hey - campus construction is booming.

We are glad to help any student get off to a good start, reform their work habits, etc. But I agree that for the most part that isn’t what interests those who are making these vague claims of free floating anxiety. I also agree that cheating has exploded. I disagree that students are keen to return to F2F, whatever they may say. I do peer review of teaching and attendance is uniformly dismal.

This is a really interesting thread. We get lots of graduates and apprentices (post A-level) where I work who do 6 month rotations through departments.

It used to be night and day if you were given an apprentice to train versus a graduate and tbh my stomach used to sink a bit as I knew it was 6 months of a lot more hand holding unless they were in the final placement of the scheme.

Lately however a significant proportion of grads have been expecting a similar level of support to the apprentices. The apprentices don't seem to be impacted as much and certainly haven't complained about e.g. in person training that requires them to be in the office. I've actually volunteered to have an apprentice again next time round and I know I'm not the only one.

But most people throughout all of recorded history didn’t get to do all that! Especially women!

And for our current students they only had basically two terms of lockdown, in summer 2020 and spring 2021! The rest of the time things for that age group were pretty normal! They were socialising, going out, doing sports, going on holidays… even in spring 2021 they are socialising both outside and in halls/house bubbles (getting way more social interaction by the way than my 9 year old, who really did suffer badly during lockdown). And hardly ANY of them wore masks. How can their lives be terribly terribly marred by what were actually pretty short periods of disruption?!

I found some old letters I'd sent to my Mum when I was at Uni and it was fascinating to read. My memory was that I wasn't stressed at all going through Uni but the letters suggested otherwise. I was saying the same type of things my stressy kid said to me when they did their exams. I was clearly lacking in confidence which was not how I remembered it!

@TullyApplebottom It was a serious question.
"did drama and sport with friends, did exams, got a job, went on holiday, went to university where I met and socialised with a wide group of people, did drama, politics and sport, did my work.."

So do people who do not have those experiences have a poorly developed brain? I ask because when I was young most working-class kids left school at 16. Some did exams like me, but not everyone. No university. No holidays abroad. No drama, politics and sport was only for sporty young people.
I did none of those things except get a job and see friends.

You are talking about a specific middle-class western experience of life that meant people generationally and around the world have never experienced.

I know some undergraduates had a hard time, especially during the first lockdown. But stating all these things such as university, holidays, sport and drama are necessary for brain development is simply hyperbole.

I am genuinely concerned that my generation (self definitely included) has really ballsed up parenting. We have been so gentle and accommodating and minimised all discomforts, always put our children's needs first, and strived for them to be what no one can ever be - permanently happy. The 'positive mindset' pop-psychology that has filtered down into education means that children fret if they are anything other than permanently happy, at ease, surrounded by supportive, like-minded souls. Anything less than total facilitation of their happiness is pathologised. It has raised an infantilised, overly-passive generation. Not all of them, but many.

Jesus suffering fuck, what is triggering about colours now?! 🙄

But @antelopevalley I think that poster was just listing their own experiences of how to mature. If you work from age 16 you are faced with endless opportunities and struggles which enable you to mature - tough customers or bosses, work schedules, commutes etc. You learn resilience. Uni is one way, work is another. But being housebound and desocialised for two years during lockdown, at one of the most formative times of a human life, neurologically, must be incredibly debilitating to their development.

Briefly - I'm having a rare lunch break! - I think I would not be best-placed to answer this, as my uni makes very few unconditional offers. UG admissions are also handled separately to the programmes, so we have little involvement with the process until they actually arrive. I would say that we have a large-ish number who are used to being top achievers in school and who struggle finding themselves getting 2:1s and 2:2s, feeling they are failing. In reality, they've just come to a very competitive institution with a lot of high-achievers.

In our department, marks tend to fall within a fairly small margin (say 55-low 70s) but lately we've seen a lot of low fails on completed work and there is a feeling that students were less well-prepared through A-Level courses during the last 2 years.

@goldfinchonthelawn well, in that case I'm delighted that my DDs grew up with an abusive alcoholic father, suffered multiple bereavements during their exam years, experienced relative poverty in our one parent household, developed life changing illnesses in late adolescence - how resilient must they be!

Actually they are. But I wouldn't have wished any of it on them.

But they were not housebound and desocialised for two years.

I think this is part of the issue. We need to acknowledge actual difficulties young adults have. But exaggerating what they experience does not help anyone, least of all them.

And for our current students they only had basically two terms of lockdown, in summer 2020 and spring 2021! The rest of the time things for that age group were pretty normal!

That may have been the case at your Uni. It wasn't the case at my son's Uni where most of the staff weren't even on campus for most (if not all) of the 20/21 year. DS didn't have a single "in person" lecture for the entire year and probably had less than a handful of "in person" seminars or tuition group sessions. His college common room was locked for the entire year. So, no, it wasn't "pretty normal" at all for most of the year. As for him being able to return home, of course he could, but the Uni weren't offering any reductions/repayments of accommodation costs so he decided to stay on the off chance that some of the staff may return to campus and start doing in person things again (they didn't!).

As an aside, I too had undiagnosed ADHD, and went to a London RG, but have a very different view/experience from @IdisagreeMrHochhauser ! The problem for people with ADHD is that they tend only to respond to stress and fear - during normal conditions our executive function fails us.

I was a chaotic student with processing issues and poor working memory who felt constant shame at the fact that, despite a good mind, I found things so fraught and difficult. My terror-induced hyperfocus pulled it out of the bag for Finals, and I got the First that reflected my abilities, in the abstract intellectual sense.

I have consequently chased work situations that operate at a base level of stress and fear, pulling it out of the bag' for the benefit of dysfunctional and exploitative organisations, ashamed of the fact that that there are some things that my peers can do that I just... can't, or at least not sustainably. If I had been diagnosed and given allowances - which would have absolved me from an impossible personal responsibility to 'achieve my potential' - I would have accepted my practical operating limits and built a life that didn't eventually crush me.

As for him being able to return home, of course he could, but the Uni weren't offering any reductions/repayments of accommodation costs so he decided to stay on the off chance that some of the staff may return to campus and start doing in person things again (they didn't!).

So he could have gone home, he was able to socialise, and so on?* *

You seem to think that staff just didn’t feel like coming in? Some universities made staff go in and no students turned up. In others the buildings and offices were locked up. Many staff had children to homeschool and no childcare, so had to stay on Zoom. I’m CEV and many of my colleagues also were (eg recovering from cancer treatment, and so on). Do you think we could just “decide” to pop in and start doing things in person if it wasn’t set up for that? Lots of people were on furlough - out non-academic staff were all on furlough, including most of those managing and cleaning the buildings. Academic and pastoral support staff were not allowed to take furlough. Our workload actually increased.

You seem completely unconcerned by what happened to the staff during the pandemic? Do you think we could magically have turned up and run a whole university without any non—academic staff? Or should the university have just made all the maintenance and buildings staff, as well as academic staff, risk their own health for undergraduates who could do their teaching online for a few months instead?

Totally agree OP. We grant so many extensions, without even requiring a single reason , then students end up clustering everything into the same week and complain to us that they don't have the time to do it. We are creating a generation of individuals who are no way prepared for the working world. I had to have meetings with students this week who were utterly astounded to discover that because they have failed modules (90 % due to non submissions and cheating) that they won't graduate with their masters. This belief that they are purchasing a degree certificate and don't need to work for it is becoming more widespread.

I don't know that our experiences are all that different really. My life feels like a car crash and a massive failure to live up to potential.

But at least I know that I achieved my degree all on my own without any help. And when things are tough I can tell myself that I feel like a failure but I wasn't then so maybe I'm not now either.

I've had loads of support since and it doesn't seem to be making the blindest bit of difference. I'm currently lying on my bed having just realised that the work I've been failing and trying to do all last week is actually a completely different task to the one I've actually been asked to do.

I don't think the support for neurodivergence is actually that good. I had 6 months of individual specialist ND coaching last year. Still struggling.

I used to be only motivated by fear too but fear no longer motivates me as I've realised that my health is far more important than panicking about what people think of me.

I'm expecting to fail in yet another professional job and then hopefully one day I'll find something that I can maintain some consistency in.