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.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow , people aren’t talking about your DD or other students with well documented conditions. I’ve sat on endless Mit Circs panels and whilst we always follow due process, it is clear who is in genuine distress, who is trying it on, and who is in this new category combining a sort of subclinical but possibly genuine malaise with a variable degree of entitlement.

But with the best will in the world there is only so much your DD’s uni will be able to do for her, and she will presumably need to finish her degree within the constraints of her loan. Every year about dozen well supported, academically able students in my own School, at a guess, fail to meet this challenge for reasons of MH. I am a harsh critic when support is lacking, but not in these cases. What would you have us do?

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow I’ve been supporting students like your DD for twenty years. So when all the the students who don’t have her issues say they also must have all the support and accommodations she gets, and they use this to just not hand the work in on time, am I supposed to let them, just because lockdown was a bit depressing? Would your DD be happy to get less support because everyone else wants it too and there’s not enough left to go round?

Plenty of posters have pointed out on the thread that a general culture of allowing any extension or allowance for no real reason actually takes support away from students like your DD. And it doesn’t help the students who really don’t have severe anxiety or migraines, but are pathologising normal nerves and normal social, academic and developmental experiences.

We aren’t teachers. We don’t have the statutory safeguarding duties teachers have; our employers don’t employ us to do that kind of job. I happen to know my students really well because if the system I’m in; lots of other university lecturers hardly meet their students and know little about them depending on the course and institution. If necessary, we refer students who need support to tutors, pastoral and mental health support. (I’ve seen plenty of well-meaning interventions by academics into student mental health support not go well.) That doesn’t mean we are unsympathetic. But does being sympathetic mean we allow any student who wants it essentially not to do the required work? That’s not what a university degree is, or what our job is.

What does ability to engage with normal life mean to you?

Can't perform normal daily tasks like hygiene activities, can't feed themselves properly. Insomnia or excessive sleeping. Cognitive dysfunction. Ignoring commitments despite being aware of the consequences of doing so. Excessive escapism and avoidant behaviour. Many different things could apply.

I also think that in the case of your daughter @ArseInTheCoOpWindow all the other factors would be considered in where best for her to study and what course given her struggles. The difference in support from family for students 300 miles away in halls compared to living at home is huge. A mostly small group delivered course with a small cohort size is completely different to a large cohort in large group lectures and 50% online. Those things need to be considered too as the University can make some adjustments but has no control over other circumstances

I do feel for recent graduates. But I can't help but feel like taking an exam in your house is completely different than taking one in an exam hall.

Reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 have to be considered. If there isn't an adjustment that can be made to make the job possible then it can't be done, taking into account cost, business needs and impact on other staff. For example, reception staff can't work from home however much they would wish so.

I work in a field where it isn't possible to make adjustments for many people so they simply can't do the job.

I think it’s interesting as in my experience there has been an enormous shift very quickly. I’m 29 and I’ve seen such big differences in attitude (e.g people calling in sick for nothing or taking a whole day off for a telephone GP appointment). It’s really shocked me. I’ve also had some annoying health issues this year and people keep telling me to take extensions or defer etc (in postgraduate education) but It’s far bettter for my mental health to crack on!

But I can't help but feel like taking an exam in your house is completely different than taking one in an exam hall.

Of course it is.

DD said she preferred doing in person exams to open book ones. She said that getting an exam out of the way in three hours or so was far less stressful than writing what was essentially an assignment complete with referncing, that she would normally be given two weeks to do, in 24 or 48 hours.

I don't think we should make extra allowances forever - I agree with you on how to help them get resilient and start maturing. I was just considering why so many of them have so suddenly become incapable.

This is a really interesting discussion and reminded me of this article by Kathleen Stock kathleenstock.substack.com/p/the-parent-trap

I was just considering why so many of them have so suddenly become incapable.

It's been a leap, but not totally, things were already headed in that direction.

But I think it's a consequence of the same things happening at schools - many kids haven't been given structure and have had accommodation, they've never had to cope with hard deadlines.

They've not developed normal levels of independence for young adults in other areas of their lives.

They haven't had to face their anxieties or be stressed, so they really believe they can't manage these feelings.

Then on top of it for two years they have never had to face the real tests that other teens had to like exams or getting themselves to class. And they don't think they can or should. They feel they've been empowered to just balk.

I've really started to feel like disempowerment - not letting people feel they are responsible for their own decisions and the consequences, like their actions won't make a difference - is a much larger issue than we've recognized and that it's consequences, especially in the teen years, are significant and sometimes long lasting.

I think the NSS had a lot to answer for. Departments are so scared of upsetting students by not meeting their every whim that there are no clear expectations set, no boundaries.

I agree with so much on this thread. As a parent of a teen, a university employee (not an academic) and as a part-time master's student who just handed in two assignments. Yes, it is stressful but dealing with the stress is part of the training.

I think the conversation needs to move from "how do we support young people?" to "how can young people become more resilient?". They, and their parents, need to take responsibility for this themselves and we needs to design schools and universities to help.

My friend is pastoral support in a 6th form and has said the exact same thing, that socially they're more like kids in Year 10 or 11. I suppose it's to be expected. Like you I am concerned and don't have an answer.

In sixth form I’ve always observed that it takes a while to get into a college mindset - the freedom sends them a bit giddy at first for a start, and then coming to terms with the fact that teachers aren’t your enemies, that you’re on the course of your own free will and can leave if you want, therefore you shouldn’t spend your time railing against perceived authority but rather realise teachers are there to help and guide you. So when we set work it’s for your own benefit rather than as some kind of punishment to make you lose your free time!

This commonly takes until about Christmas for the majority. Some have it straight away but it’s normal to need a transition period. But this year’s Y12 have taken a very very long time to settle. Some are still squarely in “school mode” - arguing with teachers, not handing stuff in etc. There’s also an odd thing that one of the PPs mentioned where they will spend a LONG time on work. Way longer than needed or asked for. And yet the work is still often of noticeably poorer quality than previous years. This happens even when I try to give guidance such as telling them how
long to spend on something (never needed to do this before as most tasks are self-limiting), giving them numbered lists with the order they should do things and so on. And yet when I look at what they’re doing they’ve gone back to a piece I’ve told them was fine and are wasting hours faffing with that instead of doing new work. Like I say, this is after explicitly being told “you need to do X, Y and Z in this order and this is what they should look like when they’re done”.

This is also very frustrating and demotivating for the students who did it all when they were asked to and then have to sit for weeks while the rest of the class laboriously catch up. There’s only so much extra stuff you can give students to do on their own, especially when ideally you’d be moving the whole class on.

This is very true

I think the issue is that people want the support and help to be given to the students who DO have problems, not just anyone who is a bit stressed or disorganised.

As an A-level teacher, I'm beginning to think that the students I teach aren't really suited to an "advanced" course at 16 any more. They don't have/yet have the independence of mind or ability to absorb material from texts and comment on it critically, with a few exceptions. And I provide masses of scaffolding. I received very little myself. It may be a cohort effect due to Covid of course. But it's not surprising these students experience difficulties at university.

Interestingly, I studied in North America in the 1990s where the students were much more spoon fed and everything was more market-driven and the academics just loved the three of us British exchange students as we'd been taught to read and write critically. We were good students but by no means top of our classes back in the UK.

This comment resonates with my experience of the NSS. Asking students about fairness in relation to their marks is insane. As if any student receiving a lower than expected mark will feel it’s fair.

Coupled with the evidence that lower performing students tend to have a poor ability to evaluate the quality of their work. Yet the NSS guides so much of our central admin thinking and initiatives.

Marking and assessment has been fair

www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/703530d2-1c8f-48fc-a62d-23b278b8b799/nss-2021-core-questionnaire-optional-banks.pdf

I've skimmed and I'll pop back later and read fully because I need to go out. I've just finished a degree as a mature student - with healthcare placement elements in it so you can imagine how wonderfully disrupted that one's been in the current circumstances! Cannot fault my department staff though - they've been brilliant. They're fucking brutal in terms of how tough they can be on us with assessments - but come out high on satisfaction every year because of how close-knit the course is with small numbers and everyone being noticed if they're starting to struggle and disengage.

I've deferred elements through it though - I had to, because my mental health just disintegrated completely with the pandemic and combining trying to do the degree with my own kids' home learning and them mentally really struggling - so I sat with my tutor and we planned moving some assessments to the summer period so I could basically focus on the kids and just keep uni ticking over until the school year was done - was supported by the staff.

I think I had a two week extension on an assignment this year as well - the kids had covid, then the husband had man-covid and then I got absolutely flattened with it for a good week - so yep, no matter how well I'd planned my schedules out and workload, and had all the prep reading done for it - there was no way that one was getting submitted on time!

I actually have mentoring funded by DSA as I've got a history of shocking mental health (now I have an autism diagnosis which explains a lot of the times in life I've struggled to cope) - have rarely needed it in terms of planning out workload, but it's been used a lot this year to offload and discuss mental coping strategies as it's been absolutely brutal going through university on a healthcare course with Covid hitting at the end of the first year. It's not fair to dismiss the massive toll that it's taken on students though - it has been horrendous - and yes, there are a few on my course who've cried anxiety whenever it didn't suit them, and I'm currently bloody pissed off as I ended up on 69% but didn't get upgraded to a first, but our chief anxiety queen got 69% and DID get a first and is currently gloating all over social media about it all!

In hindsight, part of me wishes I'd suspended for a year, but graduating and staying with my cohort was important to me - and I feared if I stopped then I wouldn't restart. We have lost a LOT of students this year - ones who took peak lockdown year out and dropped back a year, ones who've had placements fall through through no fault of their own because of Covid hitting and had to fall back a year to re-take placements, and people who've just hit the wall of disengagement and had enough.

Second year online was awful - our recorded stuff was all uploaded by 4pm on a Thursday. By 4.01pm the online learning platform had inevitably keeled over as the entire university all tried to log on to see what they had to get through. Then it was log on every morning - slog through a couple of hours of recorded lectures with no interaction (my course is very small so there's not normally this lecture/seminar division and everything is very interactive), connect to the odd scheduled thing for the day - not get to choose who you were placed with or working with for group tasks (and as an autistic - that screen going black before you go into random breakout groups is fucking awful on the anxiety), pray you ended up with a group where people were still actually engaged with the task - go back into the main room... then we would usually lose about 15 minutes while staff battled to get videos or sound clips to play - at one point we ended up being asked to analyse someone's speech sample with the lecturer playing it on his phone holding it up to the microphone on his laptop, or connections would go shitty and you ended up with seminars being conducted solely via the lecturer painfully typing with two fingers. Then trying to do assignments with only e-books available as the library was still on lockdown - and one of the e-book platforms doesn't work well with Mac laptops which made things harder for a lot of people... and my dyslexia makes reading on-screen quite tricky - I need to annotate things and highlight to process text. I loved my subject and my course - but god it drained all the enjoyment out of it. If I had been 18-19 and expecting to have fun at uni, then dropped into this without a perception of the long-term stakes in terms of student debt, future employment etc - I would have given up.

As for online exams. Hate.
Trying to get my house quiet with guaranteed stable wi-fi.
Then one of our big online ones was phonetics - video clip would be made available for the exam duration, we had to transcribe, photograph our transcription (typing phonetic characters sucks) and email it within a given time... video didn't become available at the right time - and it really threw me into a panic attack, so I was trying to fight the technology, transcribe (and phonetics is usually one which really stresses every SALT student out as it's just such a different skill and our mark requirements are so high for it), panic and get all of that done. In a normal year we would have gone into a room, with our usual lecturer delivering the exercises in a way we were used to, transcribed it and left our transcriptions to be marked. It was awful. I still passed with an incredibly high mark (I'm fucking GOOD at phonetics and linguistics) so that's not me freaking out from a lack of preparation or skill - it was just horrid.

For the info of MNetters, @CoffeeWithCheese had some genuinely shit experiences at uni. On a different thread she asked for advice and several of us responded, essentially, ‘I seldom advise students to appeal, but I think you should appeal.’

Thanks for that @poetryandwine - I was typing kind of quickly as I had to go out somewhere! I have appealed - not expecting it to bring results but it's more me living with myself knowing I gave it everything through the course.

That bloody NSS though - it's like impossible to avoid them - I tried a fair few times and then they blooming rang me up about 3 times to catch me!

Genuinely good to "see" you though @Jourdain11 - hope all is going well for you.

@CoffeeWithCheese Well done on getting through all that and coming out with your degree! I’d personally ban 69%… it’s either 68 or 70, 69 just feels personal somehow

One thing I note from your posts though is how you sat with key people & made plans for work, and then clearly actually did it (leaving aside Covid hell!). I’ve lost count of the number of students I’ve done that with, creating a roadmap for their work & how they’ll get it done, from research to writing to editing and submission. And then, so many of them just… don’t do it? And it all gets kicked to the next assessment period, and then the next. That’s one aspect I really don’t understand, I’ll admit. How do you help further in that scenario? I don’t have endless time to have meetings with students to plan work, which then never gets done. (Not aimed at you specifically @CoffeeWithCheese, more of a general point.)

Our uni was very clear from the start - lecturers could give a 2 week extension within some limits - otherwise you had to go through the formal deferral process. I think staff were lovely and helpful with students getting through that if there were legitimate reasons, but I don't think the process was as straightforward if it was someone trying it on shall we say?!