Who are Universities accountable to?

[Hattiedoodah]

An administrative issue has arisen with dd’s University - she has two exams scheduled which overlap (final year) so that she will effectively get half the time of the other students to complete the exams. She’s tried to resolve it with the student education service team and her faculty but has hit a blank wall as they said the exam timetable is set and cannot be amended. Who is the next person up the chain? I know with secondary school, ultimately if the staff won’t address a problem then you can go to the governors. With University - who is actually accountable for the fair running of the University? This seems so blatantly unfair I can’t believe the University is refusing to address it. Thanks.

If Universities are unable to timetable 48 hour exams effectively and they only expect students to spend a couple of hours on an exam (dd got back to me on that, 2 hours for hers) then surely reducing the time period to one which would allow them to timetable properly would seem the blindingly obvious solution and one it’s difficult to justify not doing.

Oh the irony!

So she's only expected to find herself a two hour slot to do the exam! The university is being hugely hugely flexible in allocating a 48 hour slot - and your solution is to reduce that flexibility!

A spot of anecdata - when we introduced 48 hour exams in the midst of COVID and online teaching, guess which group of students overwhelmingly improved their marks - yes, those with disabilities.

If she's only expected to allow two hours (plus a percentage extra to allow for her disability) then I don't think she's going to get very far OP.

I think her best bet would be via disability services but it may not come to anything.

It would likely be best that she plans her time now so that she has a plan of action well formed in advance of the exams.

A student completing two exams within a 48-hour time period is not a huge ask.
This is very much the norm across universities It's really important to encourage neurodiverse students to develop important time-management skills during university and it would be a seriously failing on the part of any university to do otherwise.

OP,

You may or may not be reading this.

You asked us to think about whether offering a 48 hr slot for an exam on which students are advised to spend two hours is absolutely fair.

This is the wrong question. GCSE and A level timetables are not absolutely fair and neither are timetables for traditional in hall exams. Absolutely fair is not the standard for life.

It is possible to plausible that the guidance has existed for previous exams. In either choosing to use her time to extremes or feeling compelled to do so, your DD has missed many chances to learn to manage her time. Should DS and the university have been doing more to help her? Possibly. But from what you say it is hard to know whether she would have heeded their advice on this.

I prefer in hall exams partly because I’ve always believed - and a PP has validated for her course - that using too much time on in home exams is much more widespread than we believe. Students who cannot put in that time are disadvantaged. In that sense your DD like the PP has been advantaged during past exams.

But 48 hrs vs 24 hrs? I presume the university has made a thoughtful decision about this. One could argue that having a greater number of students affected by overlaps - much more likely with 48 hr exams - is better for the marks distribution, because I would expect that with 24 hr exams a few students would have two exams on one day (if there are 15 exam slots and each student has six modules). They would then be badly disadvantaged. With more students impacted over 48 hrs, the effect is (a) easier for most to manage and (b) less acute.

The Registrar can only do their best. I think it was @titchy (apologies if I’ve got that wrong) who pointed out that there are only six 48 hr slots in three weeks of M-F exam periods, nine if you go into Saturday - which is biased against several groups of students and requires extra resources.

Your DD is rather lucky that this is her first conflict.

@poetryandwine I always admire your fair minded balance!

I think there is a typical clash of viewpoints here: a parent is concerned only for their child and write/speak from that point of view.

As academics and administrators those of us with experience of working in universities have to think about all our students. At my place in my Department that’s about 150 in each year cohort; cognate disciplines (in the Humanities & probably the OP’s DD’s subject) are dealing with year cohorts of 400 or so. Ditto with teaching neurodiverse students: I teach about 5-10 each year. The OP knows 2 ND students well - her DC. We have to have an overview of dozens of such students.

We have to see the bigger picture. In this case, I agree with @Hattiedoodah that the clash is not ideal and is not fair on the surface. But I’m also aware of the difficulties of timetabling. And that we - like other universities cited - don’t expect students to spend the entire time slotted we MARK such take home exams as if they were 3 hour unseen exams, not as if they were essays.

As usual, universities can’t win. (See the long running student grumpiness about recorded lectures vs requiring their attendance). Students keep on demanding that we consider what are actually ordinary things be treated as mitigating circumstances. Or that they have flexible deadlines. And then they struggle with managing their workloads.in my field we’ve stripped out assessments to the extent that sometimes I don’t think they get enough practice in writing.

Take home exams are meant to be studied for in advance, like normal in-hall 3 hour exams. I was starting my academic career in the1980s when they were first introduced. The idea was to relieve the burden of stress on those student who got too nervous about unseen 3 hour exams. Students campaigned for these sorts of exams and for continuous assessment rather than one chance Finals.

Now the take home exam is being seen as an almost unacceptable source of stress. Universities can’t win.

Look, learning something complex and advanced is hard. It should be difficult . Otherwise it’s not really worth anything.

The issue here is that we don't know what the expectations from module leaders are and OP has refused to share.
If like a PP said it's meant to be 'researched' etc etc and less time would be a detriment, yes.
If not, then they aren't being U.
We really don't know.

Thank you, @WickDittington . Your focus on the contrast between a parent’s perspective and an academic’s has been incredibly useful for me. So have your observations about the lack of resilience in the current cohort. It isn’t their fault that they missed so much but it does make things difficult sometimes.

@BeckyBloomwood3 we do know fromthe OP that guidance is two hrs for at least one of the exams in question and possibly both. It was ambiguous wording

If @Hattiedoodah is still reading I suggested way upthread that’s productive and effective way to approach this would be through the standard accommodations and adjustments for exams. At my place students get around 15 minutes extra in a 3 hour exam. So for 48 hours this would be an extra 4 hours. For the 2 exams, this would total 8 extra hours, which could be seen as quite a substantial adjustment.

I’ll gloss over how extending the exam time is not necessarily a good thing for students!

And thanks @poetryandwine - my aim is to try to explain to the OP how a university “thinks” in order that her advice to her DD is productive- rather than simply complaining.

For those not experienced in working in a university it might feel a big and confusing institution and tutors uncaring (eg the stuff aimed at you!) but we have a professional responsibility to care for all students sometimes this is hard for parents to understand.

If this issue can’t be resolved then some of my students have found it useful to analyse the impact of a problem in a specific assessment quantitatively ie work out the effect on their final aggregated mark of the worst case scenario. It’s easy to get caught up in an emotional feeling that some problem is a disaster. Deciding what the worst outcome is in itself useful- realistically the OP’s clever and well prepared daughter is not going to fail these exams, I would guess the worst outcome would be dropping a grade. She may need help reaching this conclusion. Unless the system is very different from ours this is very unlikely to destroy a student’s previous exceptional academic record. I find that once students rationalise the worst case they relax and approach the assessment more confidently.

The happiest students are those who are able to think “it is what it is” and accept that life isn’t always fair. They don’t expend energy railing against the system and generally do pretty well. That’s not to say that unfairness shouldn’t be fought, but this isn’t a fight I would pick.

Wise words, @Chemenger

Without, God forbid, wanting to sound like an expert, it is my sense that there are different approaches to the management of ASD. People may always need some extra support, that’s fine. But how much it is a good idea to help the person try to accommodate to the world, rather than accommodating the world to the person, seems to be a matter of differing opinions.

Most of the HE professionals here seem to take the view that part of our job is preparing students - all students - for the world. Not everyone else seems to agree.

Most of the HE professionals here seem to take the view that part of our job is preparing students - all students - for the world. Not everyone else seems to agree.

Yes agree with this. Moving away from OP's issue, I have sat on academic offence panel where the bunching of deadlines is given as an excuse for poor planning. I always point out to students that once they're working, their clients won't nicely space deadlines around each other, and that the soft skills learned from planning around difficult deadlines are just as important as the academic information they learn. I think students often miss that - understandable when they're in the thick of it.

'She' (i.e me) wasn't referring to you specifically, @poetryandwine , I was talking generally. And how I should have phrased it, to be pedantic and fully accurate, was "someone who comes across as thinking they understand fully and knows best".

Because usually we don't know what someone actually knows, we are going on perception. And as I said before, those of us with ND and children with ND pick up a sense of who these people tend to be.

Part of someone thinking they know more than they do about neurodiversity is that they are not open to the fact that there is a lot that they don't know, and to be led by the person with ND.

Ironically I note that your past posts focus more on you being right, and endorsed by others, rather than on how to make things better for neurodiverse students. You are interested in that, but you're agreeing with the academics that it's about the OP's daughter adjusting to things.

You've praised @WickDittington for giving the academic versus parent view, but at no point have you mentioned my viewpoint about how you were all missing how the OP's daughter would have expectations and would get stuck on 48 hours being given as a time frame, even though it won't take nearly as long. This is despite me being the only self-declared person on the thread with one of the same conditions as the OP. You've all- The Academics - ignored my points, including about how the university could better manage expectations for ND students (if I didn't already). I find that bemusing, and offensive. It suggests you do think you know best. You poetry have also since made a few snarky comments about autistic people and whether you come across as an expert, which isn't very nice and inclusive, is it?

I was the first person on here (to mirror language you've used about yourself) to say that the OP's DD should go to disability services not just about whether she can get this changed but to help her with adjusting to it. Because she will need help. She was told one thing, and has now got something she doesn't expect. Maybe she should have, I don't know if that was made clear enough to her.

I am on the fence as to whether this is unfair - because it's based on expectations for me and how clearly it was made to the OP's daughter that she may get a clash. I have never said she should have mitigations. But I completely understand how this has thrown her.

You never answered my question poetry about whether you are still working as an academic. I know that in 2021 you were saying you were a former 'lecturer' and STEM admissions tutor at a RG university. I think that you are not currently working in academia, but that as well as helping people, you get pleasure from the validation posting on here as an expert gives you. I hope that continues to bring you joy

@WriterOfWrongs I have never claimed anywhere to be an expert on ASD, or for that matter anything beyond my own sub-discipline. I don’t know how someone who denies understanding ASD and AdHD fully comes across as thinking that they do understand it or them fully except in the eyes of the beholder. As with the OP, all I can ask you to do is find the actual words where I claim to be expert and let others judge them.
The intent wasn’t there, but I am more than willing to look at actual words with you if you like. Not vague accusations.

Your next paragraph with the bold face is, to put it mildly, rather a large leap. If you find my ‘snarky comments about autistic people’ for us - which again I assure you are entirely unintended - so that we can analyse them and I can consider how serious they are, perhaps we can continue this conversation. Because I don’t see them. I can assure you, for example, that the question of how much students should adjust to the world vs the world adjusting to students is very real. It is not limited to any particular subset of students.

That ND students may get stuck on the 48 hr time frame seems to me to be a matter for Disability Services. Because I have never claimed that academics are experts

PS If you find my ‘snarky comments about autistic people offensive’ point them out in my writing so that we can analyse them …..

To continue, @WriterOfWrongs , because yesterday was very long and I was posting very late. Idid acknowledge you as someone I learnt from. You quoted me yourself, in the passage above.

I was referring to your vivid description of your ASD compelling you to ignore guidance and use every available minute in the exam slot for the exam. That was illuminating.

How much it should contribute to university policy IMO is a different question. That is why I did not focus on it more. I don’t see that this suggests academics think we know best. It suggests that managing expectations for the whole population of students is complex. We seem to agree that there is an important role for DS regarding students with ASD and perhaps DS could do more.

I don’t see any academic here suggesting that academics know what is best for people with autism. I see them taking seriously their responsibility to help prepare students for the world. Ideally this means much more for students with ASD than teaching them to mask but to some extent that depends on the services the university offers and to some extent that depends on the students’ own views about where the world should meet them. (We have many employers and PG programmes happy with our ASD students.)

I don’t think anyone who knows me IRL would say I care about being endorsed by others. I do try to credit them (except when it involves unreasonable effort) but that’s just my training.

To be fair most students ignore guidance and use every minute allowed.

Universities can’t win, it seems.

But despite the nasty and wholly unjustified personal attack on @poetryandwine what the academics on this thread have been trying to explain is that we - of fairness and necessity - take a broad view.

We may not have the “lived experience “ of the learning disabilities our students have (although none of you knows that we don’t?) but in our careers we see probably many many more students with disabilities than the parents on this thread. We probably have a much broader experience of disabilities in that way.

And it’s arguable that in ensuring fairness, transparency and the meeting of nationally benchmarked learning outcomes for modules and degrees, it’s that broad experience and overview which is actually more important.

And various academics on this thread immediately advised @Hattiedoodah on approaching student disability services. Between us we have given sound advice combined with an indication of realistic expectations for action in this situation.

Other posters may not like what we say but advice has been given candidly and in good faith. It’s unfortunate that some posters want to play ad hominem because they don’t like what we say.

I was referring to your vivid description of your ASD compelling you to ignore guidance and use every available minute in the exam slot for the exam. That was illuminating.

@poetryandwine Eh? Go back and check because you're completely wrong - I didn't say this at all. I don't have ASD for a start, and I specifically said that I wouldn't use every available minute, far from it.

We may not have the “lived experience “ of the learning disabilities our students have (although none of you knows that we don’t?)

And that @WickDittington is precisely why I said I was the only 'self-declared' ND person on here. You are also missing my point. I don't blame the universities other than saying that maybe - because I don't know - the OP's DD's university could have made it clearer to the students with autism & ADHD that they may have clashes.

Yes I know you and the other academics said to go to disability services, that's why I specifically referenced this, in agreement, in my first post to the OP.

I'd also hope that as an academic you don't approve of someone actively pretending they're still an academic - talking in the present tense about they students - when they're not and haven't been for years. It's disingenuous.

Sorry, @WriterOfWrongs , I believe that you said you have ADHD. An honest mistake.

You still have not pointed to any text where I or anyone else have been ‘snarky’ or claimed to be an expert on either of these conditions.

Thanks,@burnoutbabe . In my view that makes a problem for those who cannot eg because of responsibilities. Another reason in hall exams or software monitored timed take home exams seem more fair to me.

I accept the honest mistake of you saying I have ASD when I have ADHD, that's an easy mistake to make and not a problem. But you know it wasn't just that you were mistaken about, because I told you so above. Not sure if you're being disingenuous or you lack attention to detail... which is ironic when I'm the one with attention deficit disorder.

I specifically said above that this from you is wrong:

I was referring to your vivid description of your ASD compelling you to ignore guidance and use every available minute in the exam slot for the exam. That was illuminating.

It's complete bollocks Because what I wrote about using the time was:

Regardless of what the guidance says about how time should be used within the 48 hour period, that is NOT how an ADHD/autistic student will view it. Because difficulties with time is a key part of the conditions. I would also still view it as 48 hours. Doesn't mean I'd work the whole time period at all. Far from it. But my brain would be focused on the 48 hours and not the guidance of say 3 hrs.

Nor by the way did I ever say that you said you were on expert on ASD. I never said that, never thought you said that. I've already explained that.

I did write a long post earlier answering your question about where you'd been snarky (and no, it wasn't anyone else, jut you), even though I'd already explained. I did a long post answering your question and explaining how ND people view things and you didn't thank me let alone acknowledge it, until the OP mentioned it to you and then you said you had learnt from me but took me to task about something you thought was about you when it was general, and banging on about how you never said you're an expert.

I don't think it's worth my time or emotional investment explaining to you where you've been snarky - which I'd already done once - when you twisted what I said about the 48 hours so much, either deliberately or through... complete misunderstanding.

I'm very busy this week, @WriterOfWrongs and yes, responding in the fragments of attention I can give isn't helping my attention to detail.
To address some points you raised, again, with me and now @WickDittington :

a. I gather you found a post from 2021 where I referred to myself as a 'former lecturer'. Here are some plausible reasons for that: (i) I am in STEM and there is a revolving door between industry and academia. (ii) I took a sabbatical or personal leave, thought it would be permanent and changed my mind. (iii) I intended to refer to myself as a 'former admissions tutor', a phrase I use frequently on Mumsnet, and conflated past and present identities in my rushed wording because, as you have seen, sometimes I post in a rush and get phrases wrong. (iv) I moved from the academic to the administrative track at university. May or may not have moved back. (v) I am really just a blogger, writing on Mumsnet for the experience.

b. The reason I didn't focus more on your views of the experience of an ASD student is that I don't see the experiences of an ASD student as the main focus of the thread. I see this as a thread about policy and indeed that is how the OP conceptualised it at the beginning and at the end, although there were some detours.

I will return at some point to your spurious claims.

How far can ND allowance go? At some point you have to be "this is how it is. Deal with it?"

Like in the world of work you often have competing right deadlines.

@WriterOfWrongs this is the second post you directed to me. I don't agree with the first one, but in it I don't think you had characterised my writing as snarky. Do you mean that anything you are referring to here is snarky? Because I am not seeing it.

*Hi, as you asked :

yes your wording of "I have had several personal tutees with ASD. To a person they have been wonderful" felt cringeworthy to me. It felt patronising. I think you recognise know though that it was awkwardly worded and I appreciate you didn't meant it like that.

The next point was "each of them has struggled with perfectionism" when in the post from the OP you were replying to, the OP didn't mention perfectionism at all and gave a much more complex picture of her DD's executive functioning issues. It came across as simplistic and as if you understood, when while I think you're well-meaning and caring, your repeated talk of guidance and the expected amount of time to spend on an exam implies to me that honestly, youdon't really get it (and you're clearly you're not the only one, you get it more than most). And that's a not a problem, but someone thinking they understand fully and knows best is problematic.

This is how I see it as someone who has ADHD and has postgrad degrees - so has experience of further ed system - and an 18 yo with autism & ADHD. I don't know if it's how the OP's DD views it of course but it might help her in explaining her POV and for academics on here to understand how she'll view it and how this could be an issue for their own neurodivergent students: *

[You then went on to give an explanation. This was from 07/01 at 1.01 am]

But it turns out that OP acknowledged her DD does have problems with perfectionism. I had not thought thought it proper to query that; however the fact that many ASD students do struggle with perfectionism is yet another reason I wonder whether this exam structure is a good fit for them.

Was this an example where I was snarky? Don't worry, I will give you the others.

You'll be aware, @WriterOfWrongs , that I apologised to OP for the minor sarcasm she quotes here. However she never matched the courtesy, and she (also) consistently declined my request to point out where in my text I have implied

that having several autistic students and sat on a committee grants her a rich understanding of autism

or indeed pointed out any other use of sarcasm (which would have been unintended).