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.

Such an interesting thread- I completely agree with you OP and @FriendlyPineapple, your post really resonated too. I’m recruiting (the same as a few other PP) looking at candidates a few years post- graduation, but the mismatch of expectations vs reality is shocking. It’s £45k, but ppl don’t want to come into the (very nice, very central) office for one day a week and are expecting me to have a magical solution for their logistics. I’m honestly not interested- it’s a job, well paid for the level (above market rates) with interesting work and development. I’m not going to beg you to take it!!?? We’ve had acceptances and then they’ve changed their mind after protracted ‘thinking time’, and so it goes on. Where there are genuine mental health struggles young ppl should be able to access support (and I agree that uni systems and processes are sometimes on their knees, as @goldierocks said).

These are broad generalisation of course, but you only have to read the Higher Ed board here to catch the tendency to defensiveness and over- protection which are the hallmarks of helicopter parenting.

I never cease to be amazed by the number of parents we get contacting us! As an undergraduate, I'd have died inside if my mother had contacted my uni. As she lives in another country and can't speak English, I was somewhat protected from this possibility😁

Of course it's pretty pointless too, as we cannot really engage with them at all unless there's a serious Cause for Concern or the student has given written agreement...

It's not looking like it's going to get better. Quite a number of the s1 (11-12 yo) at my school are on 'time out' cards so they'll get out of class if they're 'suffering from anxiety'. Which is fine, but there's nothing been put in place to help them deal with the anxiety they're feeling so there's no end in sight. I worry for my own DDs as resilience does not appear to be being encouraged at all.

My own daughters (year 5 and 4, 10 and 8 years old respectively) seem to have endless mental health chat at school. It's good to have awareness but I hate how it's all so buzzword and lipservice-y. (Not very well expressed but I am tired!)

Yes!!!

I am slightly dreading the Resit period in August. Basically, I have to interrupt my annual leave - the only time I can take a proper holiday of more than 3 days - to mark a whole lot of stuff that - as @GCAcademic says, we’re deferred because students basically were allowed to give themselves extensions, no questions asked.

I don’t yet know what my workload will be in August - usually the only time I can get away to see very far-flung family.

I used to find this when I lectured on teacher training courses. We propped up the students so much when they were at university but when they went into schools they couldn’t cope. The school children hadn’t got the memo on how to support trainee teachers with anxiety and social issues. It meant so much wasted time and money for the students who should never have been accepted on the courses to begin with. Because there was/is a shortage of teachers, we didn’t have much choice. If there are lots of applicants for your courses then maybe your admissions process isn’t leading to the right candidates being selected. Students with very high A level grades are almost inevitably going to be very anxious about getting Firsts. Don’t know what the solution is though!

Sympathies! We have a ban on AL for August because there's going to be so much need for student support. It's a pity because we usually go abroad to see my family then also. Probably DH and the kids will go and I'll try to join for a long weekend...

I agree. As a mental health nurse working in a crisis team until recently, we would assess a LOT of uni students presenting “in crisis” and would spend time reassuring them that exam stress is normal, anxiety around uni exams is normal, and that they didn’t have mental health issues.
Of course there are some that are genuinely struggling and need MH support, but the vast majority would present at A&E or clinic saying that they had developed incapacitating anxiety/ depression/ other, when a thorough assessment would suggest they were exam stressed and in a completely normal range of stress levels.
Many of these young people would be asking to be admitted to hospital! And couldn’t understand that that did not require hospital treatment, or any treatment, other than to develop some robust coping strategies.
We would often direct them towards self help resources and normalise their feelings but then get a phone call from parents insisting their ‘children’ need intensive MH support or hospital admission.
There is definitely a lean on mental health to support normal human emotions that can sometimes be difficult. It’s a big part of the reason MH services are so stretched - people mis diagnosing their own normal human responses to stressful life experiences!

@GrumpyLovegood we cover this extensively within our course- both for students to recognise for themselves but also when seeing patients. It seems mad that you have to explain to young adults that being very nervous before exams or placements is NORMAL and part of life!

When I did my UG we had a zero tolerance policy on late submission and any tests or exams missed were an automatic 0; there were no opportunities to retake. I even remember my friend's mum dying days before an exam and the university telling her she would get a 0 if she didn't turn up for the exam and if it resulted in her failing the year, she would have to join the resit exams in September.

I think a lot of this has come from society treating normal anxious feelings as an anxiety disorder. People then retreat rather than use tools to overcome their anxious feelings. I suffered from anxiety after a life-altering trauma, and I worked tooth and nail to overcome it. I still have anxious feelings but there is a massive difference to how my mh was with anxiety and nervousness from a situation. And young people are being conditioned to believe both are bad and there is something wrong with their mh for feeling normal emotions.

I’ve no doubt some swing the lead but what I’ve seen with their peers, there is are a lot of debilitating anxiety and MH issues around. My DS says pushing him into doing things does not work - if you ‘make’ him try to gain resilience he just gets worse. I would say it’s 50/50 whether he takes up his uni place this year.

The issue in this sort of case is, that universities are not the NHS, and we’re not therapy. We are places of learning at a high level, and we should be pushing and stressing our students. A certain amount of stress is productive - it’s one of the ways that humans achieve things.

And students are adults. Baby adults, of course, but they do need to find their ways.

I think too many young people are pushed into university by a kind of inertia. It’s what is the “done thing” in some classes. It’s not always suited to some peoples learning styles and lives. They may need to defer university for several years, or find different ways to achieving working skills and so on.

The higher education sector has expanded massively to include people who, frankly, would be much better off elsewhere. Getting a degree is the right thing for some people. But it has become the gold standard for everyone, whether the right thing it not.

I totally agree with you @Jalisco. I feel that there are too many students who just aren’t suited to study for a university degree.

It’s a disservice to young people to tell them they need degrees when all there is to offer is debt and the same jobs they could have had without the degree

And with this ^^ as well.

That said I have found this thread rather depressing. I don’t recognise the descriptions of students here in DD or any of her friends who have just graduated with STEM degrees from an RG university.

DD has CFS and suffers from chronic and debilitating migraines. She also contracted covid in the middle of her dissertation. She applied for a PEC a couple of times (one for an extension to make up for the week she missed when she had covid) and they were refused. Somehow she managed to get her dissertation over the line in time, but with the after-effects of covid and excess fatigue it took a lot out of her. She and her friends worked really hard for their degrees.

Her university marked hard and definitely did not spoon feed the students. They were told by one of the lecturers they don’t teach to the exam. Oh, and DD has had in person exams since December as well as online exams. She got higher marks in the in person exams.

I think (from my own dd who was formally diagnosed with anxiety about 8-10 years ago) that part of the problem is that to me a diagnosis of anxiety should mean that people are aware that they need to try different strategies or approaches may be helpful, whereas I think a lot just see it as an excuse.

An extended deadline wouldn't really help- my dd-she'd be just as anxious round the second deadline. The anxiety wouldn't go away because she had an extra week, it would just be there for longer.

What is needed is to help her eg. see how she can do it on time. Break it down into doing 500 words a day for a week. Or start with 2 hours research and taking notes. That sort of thing.

A diagnosis of anxiety should mean that they are getting strategies to alleviate the anxiety, which will help them deal with the issue and become less anxious next time.
My dd used anxiety for ages (until her GCSEs really) at school as a slam dunk of "you can't make me do it".
During her A-level years she's really come to realise that sometimes you feel anxious but need to do it, and having discovered that, she's worked through strategies that mean she can do it, and is less anxious as a result.

Actually finding she can be anxious and still do it, was a revelation for her, but it's helped her mental health so much more because she now knows that she can do these things-and each time she succeeds she has the courage to try more.
Yes, sometimes she doesn't manage it, but that's also been helpful because she now has a better understanding of her limits than just backing behind the "I can't" all the time.

I think too many young people are pushed into university by a kind of inertia. It’s what is the “done thing” in some classes

The expectation is driven by schools and sixth form colleges as well. DD's head of 6th form wasn't best pleased when DD chose to have a gap year after her A levels because she couldn't be included in their statistics.

Oh god yes.
Its bloody normal to feel anxious about doing something challenging. Doing it anyway surely for most is the way to go.

An extended deadline wouldn't really help- my dd-she'd be just as anxious round the second deadline. The anxiety wouldn't go away because she had an extra week, it would just be there for longer.

Agreed. And I have said to students, "Are you sure that a 2 week extension isn't just going to lead to 2 more weeks of feeling anxious?"

What is needed is to help her eg. see how she can do it on time. Break it down into doing 500 words a day for a week. Or start with 2 hours research and taking notes. That sort of thing.

But you know, that’s how I write books , which are around 80,000 words long, with deadlines and real world consequences.

The student needs to do that work for herself. It’s not really the academic’s job to offer individual tutoring! A session with a personal tutor might help , if the student can articulate what guidance they’re looking for. But when it’s just bundled into “anxiety” which we have to accommodate, rather than the students encouraged to work out how to deal with their anxiety, it all becomes a bit pointless.

And yes. I'm very much a "give me a deadline, not an extension" person. But tbf I did uni in my 30s and already knew this about myself

@MargaretThursday Part of the problem is that many - most? - don’t have a diagnosis of anxiety. Those who do have a formal diagnosis, have supports in place including strategies like what you described for your DD.

I think it’s partly the pathologisation/medicalisation of normal stresses and strains. And the increased vocabulary and visibility around MH issues means students can deploy it to their advantage whenever there is the slightest bit of pressure, and know they won’t be overly questioned and an extension granted.

When I did my UG, I think that there was no extension/deferral option and you would automatically get a zero or capped pass for a late submission within a week, but all the mit circs were assessed at the end of the year and the cap could be lifted. I can see the issue with this system, but I do think the lack of guarantee that the cap would be lifted would act as an impetus for some, while not penalising those in need unfairly.

Imagine being on that board though! It could take a week 😴

I think too many young people are pushed into university by a kind of inertia. It’s what is the “done thing” in some classes

I'm currently in the middle of writing UCAS references for 30 L6th. At least half of them are completely unsuited for university, but of course I'm not allowed to say that.

Ha, this is basically my job. For my sins!

Over a third of the kids in DH’s school this GCSE cohort had some kind of adjustment - extra time, different locations, breaks etc - most for some kind of anxiety.

At work we noticed quite a lax attitude towards deadlines from our 2021 graduates. There were a few time critical projects this year and a couple of the grads were absolutely fantastic, pulled out all the stops to get their own tasks done and then help others. Others….not so much. There was a lot of phoning in sick on the final day, having IT problems which miraculously resolved themselves when it was suggested they might come into the office instead, turning up or joining calls late, and incomplete work being submitted. Guess which ones have been kept on and appointed to permanent promoted roles and which ones haven’t.

I imagine it was the bit where you said they still have to deliver even if their grandma died that implied that work came before family.

I'd also suggest that if your system can't cope with a single graduate needing unexpected time off your systems aren't great.

Most of the time I do expect people to get on with it - whether they slept badly, have hayfever etc. But I also recognise the need to prioritise family (to a reasonable degree) and to make sure we don't have a single point of failure. With Covid as rife as it is we can easily lose people to that, never mind disability flare ups, operations or caring responsibilities. If the SHTF because that happens to one person in the team then I don't have a good enough system for making sure the team knows what's going on, or good enough internal processes etc.

I do agree with OP's point that we're doing people no favours by providing extensions for all and sundry though - the more difficult things you do, the more things you can look back on to tell yourself "I did those difficult things, so I CAN do this difficult thing". It's a virtuous circle.

I do wonder if there is a difference with the TAG/CAG cohorts than the year that took a formal exam to get into uni. We had 2 year 13s who should have got a D and probably would have got an E under exam conditions because they did not work and needed everything spoonfeeding and probably weren't as suited to the academic rigour of a levels as what their parents believed. But the pastoral team and my line manager made me change their grade to a B because of anxiety due to covid. They both went to RG unis. A couple of colleagues have had the same story.