Uni of Edinburgh not marking dissertations/final pieces of work - anyone else's DC affected?

[Iliketulips]

DD heard this afternoon that her dissertation and final pieces of work are not to be marked by Uni of Edinburgh. She is absolutely devastated right now as she wanted her true degree result and feedback on hours of work. She feels her most recent work is the best, so will never know if she could have got her grade up. Moving forward she was seriously considering studying a masters abroad abroad and also working abroad, but now uncertain if that's possible as she thinks they'll wanted an athenticated degree.

@Xenia , @Motheranddaughter please see mu post of 15.29. If the scientists most badly being taken advantage of change jobs, the UK loses one of its few sources of international prestige. We have far too little support for basic science, but the people who have made it are bloody good. Why do you want to lose that?

I've always assumed that strike action is limited to effective monopolies, as otherwise consumers will move elsewhere, thus sabotaging the strikers jobs.

This is something which worries me about the UCU action, given the reliance on overseas students to fund the UK HE sector.

On a separate note, I read some universities are not part of collective bargaining on pay and have avoided strikes/ASAS. Is this something Edinburgh can pursue? Would it be acceptable to the UCU members in Edinburgh?

I believe in the free market (and that does include the right to strike). Yes I do know that universities have a weird not quite public sector set up but they are very similar to the public sector.

They have lost the support of the public by destroying the end of what have been some of the worst universities years ever with covid etc , no A levels in 2020 to now no marking etc. This will not be forgotten or forgiven.

In what way can universities be held responsible for no A levels in 2020?

It is the fact that the lecturers have deliberately chosen to target students who have already suffered so much,disgusting conduct

Guardian article today.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/24/uk-final-year-students-university-undergraduates-results-grades-delay?fbclid=IwAR2q5ELY-i8VcS-_xDIs67y3ID8zarVlo4AL1zh8aieI1ZLgjJsIAJly3OY

The practice is that if they employer docks 100% of their workers' pay - as they have a right to do but most are choosing not to inflame the situation further - then they legally have to send you home; in effect to 'lock you out' of your duties. Employers cannot be disciplined for participating in mandated industrial action. It's true there are areas of grey here, but technically this is not a breach of contract.

The 'voluntary' disclaimer is just that: a disclaimer.

Only the more draconian employers are choosing to impose the 100% deduction. Most have gone for a smaller percentage. And whilst it's true all professions require an element of goodwill, ask most academics and you'll get the picture that many work about a 60-70 hour week when their contracted hours are anywhere between 35 and 38. That is a LOT of goodwill. It has now been lost.

Working to contract (ASOS, ie action short of a strike) means doing merely those 35-38 hours and no more. A good many employers have threatened 100% deductions for ASOS too - for simply doing our jobs as contracted - that was long before MAB was even a serious prospect. I would hope someone in the union has questioned the legality of this.

Yes, there have been illegal practices abounding since this phase of the dispute started, including management hounding individual employees about their intentions. This, at least, is black-and-white illegal.

I think you can credit educated academics with an understanding of how the terms of their employment work, and what the consequences of industrial action are. We do so advisedly, not on a whim. Nowhere have I said I don't have the courage of my convictions or their consequences. I do. I've knowingly accepted the 100% pay deduction. This doesn't mean that, as a principle, I don't think it immoral.

This is a nonsense, and you've been told clearly why it's nonsense.

The striking lecturers have not deliberately targeted anyone, @Motheranddaughter . @SerafinasGoose explained this very well in her post yesterday, after quoting me.

Final year students have borne the consequences, after the shitty time they and their lecturers had during Covid. Whilst some stress was always going to be inevitable, poor and greedy management stretched staff to the breaking point as students suffered.

Again I believe employers and PG programmes will largely find a way to work with this. I do know that behind the strike lie many unnecessarily broken lives. If it is awful that a few DC will pay something now, and it is, this is no worse than what staff have been through for a long time now including a significant number of broken lives.

To those who say why not seek other employment, I refer you back to my post of 15.xx yesterday and the very real question of the UK’s international prestige in one of the few sectors where we punch above our weight.

Beyond this, people who are strongly research-orientated really are wired differently. Eg as DH gears up for retirement he is working out how to continue his research and postdoctoral mentoring. He has lined up a couple of visiting positions and travel grants, to say nothing of continued conference participation. To do this he had to submit a multiyear post-retirement research plan to various funding bodies.

How many PPs who blithely say ‘get another job’ anticipate making voluntary contributions to the UK’s research mission? The cohort of people whose career trajectory includes this type of service is one of the things we stand to lose.

@SerafinasGoose UCU have habitually presented ASOS as simply working to contract, but action such as MAB is a clear and obvious breach of contract. Having spent many years engaging with academic employment I can say with confidence that an alarming number of colleagues either didn’t understand the contractual implications or chose to simply accept UCU’s (erroneous) advice. They also consistently describe pay deductions in these circumstances as a form of bullying by management. So their robust industrial action (which of course they are “forced” to do) is within their rights, but a robust response from management is unacceptable. Bearing in mind that the OfS has made it very clear that Universities are required to minimise disruption to students, it’s not unreasonable to seek to deter action that will, for example, prevent some students from graduating.
Fortunately the majority of University staff aren’t participating in this action - go on to most University campuses during strike days and it’s business as usual. The HE sector isn’t perfect but it’s not broken as some would suggest. UCU can continue to kick and scream, but they don’t have the clout of, for example, the train drivers or nurses or even school teachers, and public support (if there was much of it to begin with) will be lost very quickly.

You don't need widespread participation in the MAB to make it work, especially if the local branch is smart. 15-20% actual MAB-taking members can disrupt 80-90% of the marking process because there's 1st marking, second marking and/or moderating, as well as exam board participation. It only takes 1 MAB member in the mix to disrupt the process.

Non-MAB union members in my institution have pledged 10% of their pay to cover most of the deductions being made against MAB colleagues (50% is the punishment for us) and are doing so at a ratio of between 3:1 and 4:1. In addition, most of our UCU colleagues are observing ASOS, even those who don't otherwise strike or boycott, which means they refuse to do additional marking above their own, so it's really difficult for management to reassign unmarked work.

That’s great @houseonthehill

I hope readers will note the elisions, unevidenced generalisations and mischaracterisations of PPs in @Shivermetimbers0112 post just above yours. As a foreigner, I grant she does the middle class ‘ bland British baselessly superior tone’ pretty well — something she has in common with the successive Tory governments that have got us into our current mess.

Sad for the students though, rather than great as in pp

I agree it is sad for students, @SunnyEgg . But contrary to what some who are not in the trenches blithely assert, staff have been in a bad way for a long time. The human cost has been high.

Union members are paying the price for all of us. Supporting them is great. The current situation is sad for everyone. If you are a UK citizen, you can register your desire for management to engage in talks with your MP, with the Office for Students and with the VC of your DC’s university.

You might also try to find out the history if the VC’s pay rises in recent years.

Who do people want to fund the extra?

The student, taxpayer, university or other?

I have this with my DD at her uni (Cambridge).
She has been told it will be October before she gets a degree classification.
All her hard work, all that disruption by lecturers (for all 3 years intermittently) and COVID, and all that debt.

I really want her to fight for some justice- surely the uni must be in breach of their contract with students?

Why should she have paid £27K (plus living costs) to end up with this mess?

In the past decade, by my observation, Universities have primarily been interested in that £27k (plus whatever else they can extract in accommodation fees and other things they sell to students.) They want to increase that take too, by the way. They care little for education or student value. Their main interest in degrees has beennto pressurise lecturers to inflate grades. Seriously, they give not a shit. Teaching staff do.

A great question, @SunnyEgg in that the current funding model doesn’t work well. But that is largely because of university governance.

When higher fees came in many universities went wild with building sprees and vanity projects, because ‘we have to compete!’ The mindset also shifted to a business model and the universities are cumulatively sitting on approximately £44bn in reserves. Incidentally, the salaries of VCs and upper management have gone through the roof with some VCs on £500K or more, again because ‘we have to compete!’ Nor is the correlation between the VC salary and the university quality what you would expect.

Meanwhile in STEM home fees are now inadequate, meaning that larger international numbers are needed simply to sustain courses.

I wish I had an easy answer for you. I would prefer to go back to a model where government directly funded university education and graduates paid some kind of tax for the privilege of their education.

The tax I have in mind would be paid by all graduates but would be a very low percentage of income. Nothing like the payback terms of the current loans. And it would have a term, as the loan repayment does.

These ideas are not original. I think the Lib Dems originated some of them before the disastrous coalition. There should be a national conversation.

Someone suggested I had said it was universities' faults there were no A levels in 2020. I don't think I did. I just said this particular gohort of students graduating this summer have had such an awful time of it the least you would hope is that the striking lecturers might put their own conditions/pay below the needs of the students.

I would like to see many fewer universities and about 15% of 18 year olds only going to university and to cut costs more.

@poetryandwine I’m from the Falls Road in Belfast, as far removed from your patronising assessment as you could get.
Anyone using the vanity project/shiny buildings trope has clearly swallowed the Grady kool aid, and you might want to do a bit of research on what University reserves actually consist of.
Start with a blanks sheet of paper and tell me what a University should look like, how you’d staff it, how you’d maintain it, how you’d attract sufficient numbers of students - and don’t talk about removing fees and any government (whatever hue) picking up the tab, it’s not going to happen.

One issue is competition though as universities rely on higher fees from international students. They need to attract away from the plethora of other options and that includes all that is offered.

Taxpayer I’m not sure any major party is suggesting more for it (not sure what Lib Dems are saying)

Students are likely feeling annoyed enough with £27k and feeling the experience over last few years has been worse than usual or subject to strikes. Maybe there could be room for future students but ex students are facing huge costs generally atm with rent or further removed from buying

@Shivermetimbers0112

you have done a brilliant job with the rhetoric, then.

My own university is full of buildings commissioned as soon as the fees structure came in that are already dating badly. An Institute that cost over £20M to start up, with a fuzzy mission, has been disbanded. Repurposing the very expensive building is an unanticipated major expense for our Faculty. This example is far from unique. I am not going to make itvpossible to identify the uni.

We have several new lecture theatres, office buildings and residence halls that are homages to Naughties architectural fads, already looking dated. This is true all over the country. Meanwhile the radiators in my (Naughties) building must be bled at least once a month.

I contribute to working committees and other forums. No one serious about this topic is arrogant enough to singlehandedly design a university system, nor do I have any interest in doing so for you. But so far all you’ve contributed is negative rhetoric. If you think it a reasonable challenge, why not go for it yourself?

@SunnyEgg at one point the Lib Dems were advocating for a graduate tax to replace student loans.

I agree the current issues make the situation regarding international students complicated.

@poetryandwine the only negative rhetoric I see comes generally from the UCU. I fully accept that there are legitimate areas of concern, but the drip drip drip of “woe is me” stories, the majority of which fail to reflect the reality of HE for most, simply makes their arguments lack credibility. For example, pay might well be a fight worth having but UCU cling to national pay bargaining which, inevitably, restrains pay to what can be afforded by the least well off HEIs. Pay more than that and redundancies are likely to follow, something of course that UCU equally can’t countenance. By all means pay academics what they are worth, but if that’s done properly there will be significant differentials between subject areas etc.
For as long as I can remember UCU have been issuing dire warnings about an exodus of academic staff, a brain drain etc etc, but it remains relatively easy to recruit academic staff at all levels. Why? Because it’s still a healthy and privileged sector to work in.
At one of the HEIs I was part of the UCU complained about money spent on a new Library facility - in what warped world does the provision of a library, in an academic setting, represent “vanity”?

@Shivermetimbers0112 I actually favour a system with fewer universities and more pathways to the middle class. Somehow the UK has got the idea that degree = middle class whereas in Germany and Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent Italy, France, etc, there are several pathways to well respected high paying jobs.

The differentials you write of are not a big concern to me. The overall loss of nonvocational subjects would be; however when these subjects are pursued by able students, their worth is easy to demonstrate (the students compete very well on the job market).

I don’t understand why any scholar would complain about library expenses. Perhaps they were objecting to the installation of numerous machines dispensing vanilla mocha almond lattes (and such) with whipped cream? Only sort of joking. Can you say more about the objections? They sound very strange.