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.

It does sound like university managements have been very unreasonable. I remember the departmental secretary on my degree course (1990s) having one of those signs that said Poor Planning on Your Part Doesn't Mean an Automatic Emergency on Mine...but she could say that, as it wasn't being normalised by her institution.

My school did essentially give teachers extensions in these situations but the issue for us is that then there are knock on effects, viz: cancel student homework for a week because it's PHSE 'kind week' or some such twaddle x repeat this regularly = get to the end of the academic year and surprise surprise, find the course hasn't been covered...students find endless excuses for not doing tests, essays and exams because reasons = poor UCAS prediction as no evidence = can't apply for the courses they want. Teacher then pressurised to organise endless resits which generally show same level of achievement...argh!

I am sometimes nostalgia for the 1990s when if you failed something it was on you.

But people "abuse" deadlines in all walks of life. There's nothing particularly special or unusual about the student/lecturer relationship.

I'm an accountant. Every sodding year, people will try to hand over large piles/boxes of paperwork at lunchtime on 31 January and expect us to have worked through it and filed their tax return by midnight that day! It's happened at every single firm I've worked at, and any kind of client can be the culprit, including professionals and academics! That's after a sequence of reminders throughout the TEN MONTHS they had to get the paperwork together to give to us! They think it's fine that they've had 10 months to basically put a load of paperwork in a pile and drive it over to us, but we only need a few hours - they clearly think we don't have any other clients! Any accountant/tax adviser will tell you the same.

Like your University management, HMRC don't help! During covid, we burst a gut to get tax returns submitted on time, hassling clients constantly in the final few months, only at the last minute, for HMRC to extend the deadline, which makes us look fools, not to mention our wasted weekends and evenings to help disorganised clients which turned out to be unnecessary. It sends a VERY poor message to taxpayers who'll then have an unrealistic expectation that deadlines will be pushed back again in the future!

It's not just accountants, I know solicitors who tear their hair out when their clients leave it to the last possible minute ahead of completion day or a court hearing, when they could have sent the info/documents needed weeks earlier. I know shop workers who are constantly harassed by customers expecting to be able to walk into a shop at 1 minute before closing time and then wonder around aimlessly filling a trolley!

Rather than whingeing about students, I think you have to accept that the population at large are becoming very poor at personal responsibility in lots of different ways, and the "nanny state" is facilitating it with all manner of extensions, exemptions and turning a blind eye to rules etc.

@Jourdain11 whatever the solution is, it requires that academic and support staff stick together and sing from the same book. I hear in my institution there's a desire to go back to the pre-Covid situation, but this isn't possible if I follow the rules and tell a student "no, I cannot give you an extension because your computer crashed, you need to plan in advance and use the library computers if necessary", and then they say "oh but your colleague gave me an extension for exactly the same reason earlier today".

@user1497207191 I completely see what you mean, as I said in a previous post I think the culture of online always 24/7 has a lot to answer for it, in that it distorts our perception of time and its cycles. And I must say that academics are also culprits of it. I have recently edited two edited collections, and I was quite lucky in that most of my contributors were very respectful of deadlines. Me and my co-editors were also very clear that not meeting a certain deadline could mean that your chapter wouldn't make it into the collection (as it indeed happened in one case).
On the other hand, I have been an author in several edited collections and all of them have had massive delays - like 6 or 7 years from invitation to actual publication, due to authors who feel it is ok to submit their chapter one year late with no explanation. I think it is incredibly disrespectful of the work of the editors and also of the other authors (who might be waiting for their chapter to appear in print for the purposes of REF or promotion, which do have strict deadlines). Sometimes I feel that if academics aren't able to stick to deadlines then what hope is there for students...

On the other hand, I have been an author in several edited collections and all of them have had massive delays - like 6 or 7 years from invitation to actual publication, due to authors who feel it is ok to submit their chapter one year late with no explanation. I think it is incredibly disrespectful of the work of the editors and also of the other authors (who might be waiting for their chapter to appear in print for the purposes of REF or promotion, which do have strict deadlines). Sometimes I feel that if academics aren't able to stick to deadlines then what hope is there for students...

One of the reasons that academics are failing to meet publication deadlines, though, is related to the issue we’re discussing, the utter erosion of research time with no clear end to term-time, with marking, meetings and other teaching admin filling the weeks between terms. Our exam boards used to be at the end of term but are now pushed into the so-called vacation because we need to allow time for all the the late submissions. Research is supposed to account for 40% of our time, but (and I admit my case is unusual as I’m a HoD), I’ve managed three days this academic year. Yet again, I’ve booked annual leave in August just to carve out some space for research.

Oh, and the fact that universities discovered Teams and Zoom during the pandemic hasn’t helped either. People sticking all sorts of online meetings in your diary with no regard for the fact that the periods between terms used to be when we could get our research time and annual leave slotted in. Now you’re expected to duck out of the archive or library (which we’ve only managed to get back to after two years) to join some bloody meeting.

All of you say is absolutely true @GCAcademic. Every year, term obligation seem to finish later and start earlier (re-sit boards and the like). And it's absolutely true re Teams and Zoom. In the past I used to work one or two days a week from home - on research, but also on other tasks that I feel I can accomplish best if I have several hours of uninterrupted time. If someone wanted to schedule a meeting you could always say "I'm not going to be on campus that day". Obviously now this is gone...

To my mind giving extensions is pointless unless the student has been too ill to work during the few days before the deadline.
I am not really recognising this idea that it's the academic study of an undergraduate degree that is causing all these mental health problems. When I was a student in the early 2000s I was never aware of anyone getting overly worried about studying. Most people did the bare minimum during the first year before possibly trying a bit harder later on. If you failed you did a resit and if you failed that you resat the year. It really wasn't this huge cause of distress. A very few had some tragic personal circumstances that meant they had mitigating circumstances, usually close family bereavement.
For others any stress was more likely due to the usual homesickness or boyfriend trouble. You didn't expect to get any special treatment for that . Certainly no one would have been telling academic staff about that type of thing.
The pandemic was awful for a lot of people and I really feel for young people and students however granting extensions and making the degree easier isn't going to bring back the lost socialising opportunities etc. If anything it just creates more problems.

To my mind giving extensions is pointless unless the student has been too ill to work during the few days before the deadline.

Yes, when being asked for extensions I've noticed that some students work under the assumption: ok, I need 5 days to complete the assignment, 2 days to do the reading, 2 to write the thing, 1 to proofread, then submit. So they don't start working on it until 5 days before the deadline, and then a very short-term illness, or something like the tutor not replying to their requests for clarification about the brief (perhaps because it's the weekend??), will complete derail their plans. There's no concept of planning for the unexpected, which we all have to do. And I agree there's a generational change as well: I studied in another country, but I can well imagine that if me or my fellow students bombed an essay by what was objectively bad planning on our part, we'd just bite the bullet and maybe learn the lesson for the next time.

My last faunal year student Nurse made absolutely no effort to start he dissertation, but the university gave her extension after extension. She did eventually hand it in. But we'd have never been allowed such leniency.

So they did happen, but not to the same scale. Rather than never happened before.
I remember talking to a friend at the beginning of the pandemic who said she was used to lockdowns as the village she came from abroad, had a lockdown whenever a serious infectious disease came to the village.

I’m not quite sure what point you think you’re making here. The point I’m making is that there isn’t anything comparable in scale and potential effect in our past. What you’ve just said doesn’t contradict that.
id be very interested to know where your friend is from though. Never heard of anywhere in the modern world relying on repeated lockdowns to combat infectious disease as a long term strategy. But even if such a place exists, I don’t think that disproves the assertion that lockdowns are wholly exceptional in this society, and might be expected to affect children and young people.

Ps you might want to take your interesting points to the medical and educational experts I hear frequently on my radio explaining quite how significant they think the impacts on children and young people have been. They clearly need you to tell them how wrong they are.

@aridapricot

There's no concept of planning for the unexpected, which we all have to do.

That isn't just students though. Lots of adults are also incapable of planning for the unexpected!

To my mind giving extensions is pointless unless the student has been too ill to work during the few days before the deadline.

DD asked for an extension for her dissertation because she lost a week to covid when she was too ill to do anything at all. It was refused. Even her dissertation tutor was horrified that it was refused.

However, DD did manage to get it over the line in time, but it knocked a lot out of her.

It's not just extensions either. There seems to be a lot of "scaling" in the marking of the exam papers.

My son had a exam with basically two questions of identical marks (choice of 2 out of 4). He only did one, but spent all the time on it, and he was expecting a very high mark for it, (into the 90's as he says himself he made a perfect attempt at it). I won't go into why he didn't do any others but afterwards he found out most of his cohort didn't either!

So, basically, he was aiming for an overage %age score on that paper of maybe 47/48% which he'd have been very happy with he thought his scores on other papers were high enough to compensate.

On results day, he was astonished to see he'd been awarded 78% on that paper - so he actually got more marks than possible for the 1 question that he did. There was a lot of speculation in that module's group chat that so few people had done any of the other 3 questions that they changed the weighting to give more weighting to the question that it turned out, they'd nearly all done, just so that the target x% of students would have been in the usual split of scores at each level.

Obviously delighted for DS!

I'm regulary astonished at how far marking criteria can be stretched to avoid failing a student, or to avoid a significant percentage of the cohort getting a low/very low pass...

For example: essay question is on class in Dickens' "Great expectations", student writes an essay on gender in Austen's "Emma". In the university system I studied in, this would be an automatic fail. In my department, there would be a lot of "but akshally the essay is well-written, and one of the marking criteria is "good writing", and even though there is no engagement with class you could argue that gender is also an important topic", all in the interests of get them to a Pass.

Just a few figures here from my course which I graduated from last week -
67 started
1 committed suicide
3 attempted suicide, removed from course
2 removed for sexual assault
3 removed for breaching confidentiality
2 removed as unfit to practice
8 had fitness to practice hearings in addition
16 left quoting stress and study/life balance
which left 32 to graduate

which hopefully shows why student support and mental health services is essential

Just to add the 8 who had hearings removed themselves possibly before the uni did that for them

@reallypuzzledoverthis

which hopefully shows why student support and mental health services is essential

Exactly. Whether lecturers think mental health issues, depression, etc is real or not, the reality is that IT IS REAL for the students suffering it, and glib comments about resilience, "stiff upper lip" and other such crap don't help prevent suicide attempts and dropping out. AN unhelpful or unpleasant remark from a lecturer (or anyone else) minimising a student's suffering can be enough to push them over the edge. It really doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong when a student's life is on a knife edge!

I haven't seen anyone be glib about poor student mental health on this thread. Lecturers and teachers are people too. We can't do our jobs if we've got to wonder if every conversation about a deadline might send someone fragile over the edge. That's quite different to reporting concerns if a student discloses something, of course.

Word soon gets about if deadlines aren't real deadlines (like the tax example above).

Also, lecturers are not MH professionals and it can actually be profoundly unhelpful to the student for them to try to take on that role. To an extent it falls more within my remit, but I'm also not qualified to diagnose or treat students' health conditions, mental or physical. Of course university staff should be mindful of potential concerns and flag up/signpost/make adjustments as necessary. But if it comes to the point where the student is unable to fulfil the requirements of the course then that's a different conversation. As I've said previously, I don't think that interrupting studies should be looked down on, and in some circs it is the most helpful and appropriate option.

There are other students, however (and I'd say this is a larger group) where they are coming to realise that using certain language will entitle them to leniency and extensions, which they may feel will help them at the time, but which they might regret further down the line. My thoughts about this 'culture' going too far are more in relation to that group than for those who are in genuine crisis.

Of course, there is another group where there might be a short-term or unexpected issue, crisis or health concern, where a week-long extension or deferral of an assessment till August is exactly what is needed, and that's where it is really appropriate to use those mechanisms.

How did you get to know these details?

I think you are probably right. I also think, with younger teenagers, that "mental health" seems to have become a bit of an excuse to not do things that make you feel bad/anxious/stressed etc. As in, "sorry I couldn't do the favour I said I'd do for my friend for mental health reasons". I say that not to dismiss genuine struggles nor to imply that they're making their feelings up, but I think they are genuinely incapable of distinguishing normal unpleasant feelings from mental illness. There's also an excessive avoidance of pressure or negative feelings.

I agree with this. I speak as someone who sabotaged my own degree grade a few decades ago by handing in assessed essays two weeks late and messing up my attendance and essay completion for most of my final year.

This is a complex problem but not to be solved by endlessly stretching deadlines. Some of these students simply do not have what it takes, and their anxiety comes from knowing this deep down. It would be a kindness to remove them from the course. Many are bright and capable but incapable of managing their time; still others are putting themselves under extreme pressure to gain top grades.There may be a few who have real additional needs like ADHD or undiagnosed dyslexia.

I often think I would have benefited from something like a procrastinator’s boot camp, led by a psychologist and one of the tutors, using social support and breaking down assignments into manageable sections. Such interventions take funding and resources, of course, and RG unis of the time prided themselves on their hands-off approach, so would have turned their noses up at them. But I think increasingly universities are going to have to be more proactive in dealing with these problems.