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.

We certainly have student in the department who appear to have received 'generous' Maths grades and have really struggled with the quantitative elements of their programme. In hindsight, we should have been prepared to put in place some foundation teaching. We were seeing grades in the 0-20 range for completed work and that is almost unheard of on our programmes.

for me, I cannot speak for others, but when my mind was in fragments, so to speak, it was university that gave me structure and gave me focus, defering, never came to me as a viable option, it was crack on and hope for the best.

I completely agree OP! I'm a lecturer at a very well-regarded London university and we actually have OPEN BOOK exams. I mean... in my view it's pretty hard to fail an open-book exam given that we actually give students the answers to all the questions!! Yet an overwhelming number of students ask about deferrals and suffer from anxiety and stress.

I am increasingly convinced it's a real problem. My daughter is a little high strung, but was always quite a trooper, but when she was 14 her class did a long unit on MH and anxiety. She became convinced that she suffered from anxiety and it totally became a focus for her, and also an excuse to avoid normal discomfort.

And for most people the best answer to situational anxiety is to get through the situation, which ceases to have the same power after that. And in fact the whole emotion ceases to have as much power.

But it seems to be the opposite of what the school teaches them.

DD found her "open book" exams really tough. She still had to know her stuff to know where to find references. She said they ramped up the difficulty for them considerably.

@SmithfamilyRobinson
The scepticism here is very damaging, no one here knows what poor MH looks like!

This is so true. One of my kids gets anxious and it plays out by him putting hours and hours of work into everything. He now has a graduate job and is working stupid hours and because he is so hard working his stupid managers just pile more and more work on him. I can see what happening but I'm powerless to stop it. His stupid managers can see what hours he works and suggest he doesn't work so hard whilst simultaneously loading him with more and more work. 😡😡😡
My son refused any help at university and deeply resented that so many students faked MH issues to get extra time etc. The unfairness made him feel a lot worse. An example was where students needing (or not?) extra time were given exactly the same paper as the rest of the students but two weeks later. Obviously they all knew the content of the exam by then 🫤. That was just stupid and unfair of the university.

It's not just universities where the adjustments don't always seem ok. There are some very time pressured professional exams where students with adjustments get something like 60% extra time.

That's fantastic for students that genuinely need adjustments but are massively unfair for students that are not genuine.

I wonder if removing any time limits (within reason) from exams would help make them fair for all.

I totally agree it's not the universities' job to do it. It should have been learnt at school, at home, with earlier experiences. At a safe time where if they don't manage it they're less on their own.
It did take a lot of work to get dd to realise that she couldn't just not fancy something and say "my anxiety's playing up" and not do it.

And actually me/school suggesting ways of dealing with it isn't really helpful for dd. She has to find the way herself. Once she could see that she would miss out if she always gave in to the anxiety then she began to discover that she could find strategies that helped her cope.
Every time the school just let her off the hook it reinforced the message that she couldn't cope with it, and made her more anxious.

The want to do it has to be greater than the anxiety though, and that isn't always the case. However, with dd, she's discovering more and more that she can find ways of working with her anxiety rather than it taking over.

Haha, complete aside, but I wonder if I'm the only one finding myself trying to figure out if any of you work at the same institution as I do! Mine has some fairly specific terminology which I've tried not to use, but I imagine I've been indiscreet enough for anyone else who worked there to know where I am talking about!!

Yes of course you have to revise to know where to quickly find the answers, but surely it's still infinitely easier than having to actually memorise everything. At our uni there is no added difficulty for open book as opposed to closed book exams.

I think that when students are looking for extensions for anxiety, it's a very good sign that anxiety isn't the issue, the issue is that are not keeping up with the work.

If the issue is just free-floating anxiety, extra time is not going to help, at best it displaces the issue for a week or so.

At our uni there is no added difficulty for open book as opposed to closed book exams.

They certainly marked the open book exams more harshly at DD's university. The questions for her finals were assignment length ones, but to be completed in a much more limited timespan than if it had been set as an assignment.

Yes! I teach in a secondary school (independent, pretty much always in the top 30 in league tables, hugely sought-after), and over a third of our Year 12s have 25% extra time and/or use of a computer/rest breaks. These are kids who got through a selection process at 11 with no extra assistance, but now have slow processing or anxiety, and I do not believe they are all genuine. Some clearly are, but nearly 40%?

I would much rather that every student got a generous amount of time - maybe four hours, say - for exams that are currently being crammed into 90/120 mins, and that they could choose to stop once they were happy they’d had time to do their best.

The current system is just penalising those who can’t write fast but aren’t morally bankrupt/wealthy enough to get a pet child psychologist to declare them in need of 25% more time, their own room, and a comfort blankie.

I felt exactly the same way.

I'm going to bed now (more of the same tomorrow!) but wanted to say thank you everyone for the interesting discussion. It's been very nice to exchange thoughts and I'm coming away from this with some interesting perspectives which I wouldn't have necessarily thought about myself.

@Jourdain11 you've definitely found your people here. You’re a great ambassador for pastoral care esp with that level of knowledge about mental health issues.

Can I ask if you’d give your employee some slack if their parent died; is it just grandparents’ deaths that have to be fitted in around work deadlines?

My Dad died suddenly when I was 25, I had to leave work to rush to the hospital 7 hours away at very shortly notice, didn’t stop my arsehole of a supervisor calling me the next working day to ask me about a document I’d been working on.

I agree, but then I think we have raised an entire generation that has been told that feeling anything other than joyful and productive 24/7 is a pathological problem that needs counselling and medication. I see it all the time. Teens-early twenties who are traumatised that people disagre with them, or that they can't have what they want when they want it or something minor puts their schedule out. We haven't raised them to handle adversity but to complain that it should never exist.

DS started the year not using his allowed extensions (he has ADHD and autism) so actually, he is able to cope if he sets his mind to it, despite his neurodiversity. But then he partied hard and got extensions. He told me several of his friends were given extensions on the extensions, well into July! (Also good Russell Group London uni - maybe yours.)

Ahh, thank you. That is so kind. I do have a qualification in the area but God, I couldn't work in the sector and I'm in awe of people who do on the whole. One of the issues we have is students who genuinely do need acute or long-term intervention being desperate to access uni counselling when it simply isn't an appropriate service for them. Unfortunately I don't feel the institution's dedicated MH team is always great at signposting, although they do an unbelievable job considering how stretched they are.

I think not mine, as we had an earlier mark submission cut-off. Although I don't know what other departments might be doing! 😂

Too many schools are pushing pupils in to applying for university, at ds old school it was compulsory to apply for university even if you didn't plan to go. There are jobs around for kids with A levels.

The audacity! Imagine trying to have a better work/life balance than previous generations. 😱

21.6% of GCSE, AS and A level students got extra time in 2020/2021in England got Extra time. That's absolutely ridiculous. Regardless of how many of those are genuine it shows that something needs to change. I suspect the numbers in Unis might be even higher. At my kids universities you could basically just ask for extra time if you wanted it.

It's so unfair to the other kids, too. And they do notice, and in truth I think many think it's often unfair even with students who really do have problems. It creates a lot of cynicism.

I was undiagnosed autistic throughout all of my education and had no accommodations at all. Managed to pass all my exams, including finals at Cambridge, with a huge amount of stress but I did it.

I think if everyone had fussed around me and told me I couldn't, I would've believed them and wouldn't have even applied to Cambridge. My self esteem is always through the floor and I've struggled at work with overwhelm but I always have the knowledge that I succeeded in a competitive university to bolster my confidence and reassure myself that I'm not stupid.

I know some people need support. I probably needed a lot more support than I got. But resilience is only really built by trying and failing and trying again and feeling a sense of achievement, whatever small thing was accomplished - even if that was just trying at all.

@MsFrenchie I don’t think you are necessarily treating them badly. I think they as a cohort perceive themselves to be treated badly on the regula. I’m just floating the idea that these are kids who are different. Maybe it’s not them who are broken. They’ve had massive upheaval in their formative years. Lots of people have reevaluated how they prioritise work and family in the pandemic, but these kids developed their priorities through it. Maybe they look at things differently? Maybe they don’t want what you value?

I”m sure the ideal is somewhere in the middle. I just think it’s interesting to see both sides.