Help advice needed re really poor uni admin screw ups

[RhubarbandC]

Help my son is at a pretty well thought of uni. He is ND and also struggling with his MH. Last summer he got EC and did 2 resists which he passed well. This enabled him to continue on to the 3rd year of an MEng this year. He had an email confirming this.Unfortunately they made an admin mistake and unrolled him for a few weeks so he started his dissertation 4 weeks late and don’t get the subject he was expecting. He didn’t have a great year mentally and the above didn’t help but managed to submit his dissertation and do his final exams this year .Needs to do 2 resists and resubmit his dissertation. EC were discussed by course leader before both. Nothing onerous. Went online today and last years resits have been removed from his profile with the result that they have awarded him a DipED and off the retake route for a BEng which is completely incorrect. He has emailed to alert them to the error but we’re really worried they won’t be able to find last years resists grades if they’ve just disappeared. It’s such a stupid mistake as he wouldn’t have been allowed on to the third year without them.

He has paid a fortune for this degree and needs to study for the 2 resists but can’t even book them. The worry isn’t helping him focus on his studying and I’m so bloody angry, their admin is shite. These young people pay a fortune in fees , his ND and MH struggles are well documented and twice he has been messed around.

Is this normal and how likely is it that the grades will be found?

You sound deeply caring and you write much that is sensible.

But the reason this is an IT issue as I understood it is that the transcript reflects only the pre-resit marks. I assumed a system failure for one of several reasons or an outside chance of hacking (not just of DS records)

Now I realise I may have been assuming that DS had checked his marks since doing resits and seen that they were properly updated. OP did not quite say this, so that is on me.

If marks were updated and reverted, it is an IT issue. If the marks were never updated - which is quite possible if DS never checked - it is an admin error at School level. Still very serious and does not change my basic advice, but not as serious as failing to secure student marks.

OP, do you know whether DS checked his transcript to confirm that the uncapped Y2 resit marks were ever entered? It doesn’t change the advice but the gravity of the uni’s mistake is somewhat less if the School simply(!) failed to record the resit marks. Yes it is still very bad which is why DS can proceed the same way.

Resit marks in year 2 were uploaded. Then they were taken off/ wiped or just disappeared,he’s not sure exactly when.

I do wonder if it is IT as when he was sorting out the last debacle I think he was told his profile would be complicated for the IT system after retakes.🤔A fair few must do retakes at some point so it must be pretty poor software to struggle with something basic like that. Why would admin staff take them off? 🤷‍♀️

Thank you, OP. IT issue then. Very grave. The uni must help relieve the stress caused to ND students.

IT staff would not deliberately remove the correct marks.

The marks added at a certain time may have accidentally been removed during a back up or upgrade, especially if IT has been cut back.

Also the marks records may not have been secure and could have been hacked by a student or an outsider, maliciously instructed to revert to the old marks. This becomes more plausible if the uni is trying to economise and do IT cheaply, reducing security. That is no excuse, however.

If DS has taken those screenshots of the incorrect marks he should tell the Office for Students with Disabilities that he has done this in order protect himself. They will understand that he has some leverage; he should not go into detail. It can only help his case.

My son wonders if him not doing the May resists last year ( because he didn’t need to having secured good marks in the August sittings) “confused” the system. But that doesn’t explain why the August results were loaded on to the system and then disappeared , it also doesn’t explain the lack of common sense ie a student on a third year MEng would have needed to have got the grades from either last year final exams or resits to actually even be there and would thus be eligible for resits this year so awarding a diploma and wiping info from the system was clearly not going to be correct.😖 They recognised the mistake pretty swift this week so why not then and before putting my ND son through extreme stress at a time that is already hideous and a repeat of screw ups last year. Would just like to point out that seeing your friends all over SM at their graduations you’re not attending when your’re ND x2 and battling MH struggles is hard enough, dealing with this on top is really tough and so unnecessary. ND, SEND and MH friendly it isn’t as an institution.

Bizarrely the retakes are 1 at the uni and 1 online at home. Not helpful for somebody who is ND and lives 5 hours away! He will suck it up if the May resists are the same and he ends up doing them but it just seems daft and doing an important long exam in a hotel room is risky as regards WiFi and noise. As I said last year they had this ridiculous clunky system of students having to take photos of the finished paper at home and uploading them. How is that going to work in a hotel room? I guess we’ll have to pack a printer. Last year they thankfully changed them at the last minute to both at home so at least he was in familiar study friendly surroundings. Either resits held in uni or at home is fine but both venues is just really unworkable for students who live a long way away which many will.

We do have a problem as I have no doubt pushing for EC of uncapped resists in May or retake of year 3 uncapped is going to take a long time to be finalised and it’s going to be hard to make a timely decision without all the relevant information.

An added bit of pressure to the proceedings is you have a very short amount of time to upload your pictures at the end of the exam before being disqualified so surroundings are important. Maybe it’s the same everywhere but it does seem incredibly basic for an apparently state of the art uni in 2025.

The marks won't be gone, they'll still be in the database, it just sounds like something has been done (by a human admin person) to mean that the marks are no longer showing on the transcript. It will be fixable.

I would talk to the uni about the 'at home' one. If the two exams are too close together for him to actually be at home then they surely can give him a space to work on campus if he's there anyway?

I find this whole thing baffling. It's giving me new respect for our student records team because this couldn't happen at our place. Human error can happen and I'm sure some other glitches but results can't disappear.

Yes it has been “fixed” to some extent ie the results have been found however the damage has been done and continues to have an impact, it’s incredibly poor that it has happened, it’s on the back of several errors, doesn’t bode well as regards sorting out what he should do and there is clear deficit of thought as regards students with ND, SEND and MH difficulties who are more likely to be in in this position.

Said retakes are on 2 days back to back🙄, again where is the common sense? There is no way he is going to be able to do them anyway and he’ll be looking at May if he goes down retake route but it’s just the lack of thought I find baffling.

OP confirmed upthread that the marked exams were found. It was an IT issue however. That’s serious

I'm so sorry to hear about all of this. I'm struggling to follow the course of events a bit, but I hope that your son will get the support and resolution he needs via his academic department. I don't know if it's a lack of thought, honestly it will be more about a lack of staff resource, knowledge and experience. People might assume that universities have huge teams of staff working on exams, assessment, records, teaching co-ordination etc but we are literally on our knees working with skeleton teams. Often with new staff who just don't have the detailed knowledge and experience that comes with many, many years in the job. And we're working with a bunch of disparate systems that are often not fit for purpose.

Universities in the UK, except for Oxbridge etc who will always bring in enough international students to keep themselves well afloat, are not going to survive the current funding crisis and constant further cuts. If there are no decent admin staff left, everything will go wrong. Students will be the casualties. And it's not OK.

What a great post and how sadly true, @BlibBlabBlob

In brief, the Y2 uncapped resit marks disappeared from DS transcript, making it appear that his enrolment in Y3 had been a mistake and preventing him from signing up for Y3 resits.

Because of his ND condition this caused a crisis and made it impossible for him to revise.

At one point he was offered the option to do the resits in May, doing Y4 in the meantime. Y own experience of Mit Circs panels and some struggling tutees as well as DS’ history led me to suggest it would be better to repeat Y3. This IT mistake is actually very serious and it is not the first admin mistake uni have made with him. They owe him a chance to get things right.

PS Actually @LIZS and @Tantomile suggested repeating/taking a year out but I am afraid I ran with it. Credit to them!

Absolutely @BlibBlabBlob We had an amazing departmental administrator who was student-facing and knew everyone and everything. I always went to her if I needed to know what was going on with a particular student. They’d chat to her in a way they wouldn’t with teaching staff. And she knew the systems backwards (they often were, actually). She took early retirement because of the way things were going at my place - and were not a university in more than the usual financial difficulties ie every university outside of Oxbridge!

@RhubarbandC I think you have an excellent case for getting both exams to be at home. Failing that, he should do both at Lancaster.

Which college was he in? The Colleges all have visitor accommodation and in his situation, the Colleges pastoral care people could step in. My experience as an external examiner at Lancaster was that they could be quite flexible in certain circumstances and I was also aware of the role of College tutors and Heads of Colleges as advocates for their students.

So it would be entirely possible for them to offer him a quiet room on campus in which to take both exams.

It really sounds like he needs to set out the timeline of his exams and passed and failed modules and resits and sit down with someone in person to explain. Department administrator would be the best person at this point. Academic staff will be on holidays or at conferences. It’s a busy time of year for us but not a teaching time of year, IYSWIM.

Not doing the May resits when he did not need to won’t have anything to do with this.

Presumably DS could be provided a quiet room in his School to do the ‘at home’ resit the next day? The scheduling will have been to avoid direct conflicts for everyone doing resits. Sometimes it is difficult to do more than that. I agree it is not great but it is the least of the issues.

A highly thoughtful and helpful post as usual, but we hope DS will be repeating Y3 instead of doing summer resits.

However it is not clear to me he can arrange to repeat before the resit period.

OP, @ParmaVioletTea made an excellent post.

If DS cannot arrange to repeat Y3 before the resit period he will need to take advice on what to do. My own advice would be to do the resits and then proceed with the EC and request to repeat.

Definitely bring in the mitigating circumstances and presumably he has an individual learning plan? That’s what we call the document setting out reasonable accommodations at my place, but there should be something like that everywhere.

I do find this really surprising at Lancaster - my impression of it as an external has been about the exemplary care for students. The financial bite of low fees must really be hitting.

DS is apparently not registered with the Office for Students with Disabilities. At my place this is required for granting accommodations.

Registering, and learning to work within the system, is something he could practise during a second go at Y3.

Hi, OP -

I hope someone with greater knowledge will correct me if I am wrong.

My reading of Student Finance England rules is that in changing to the MEng DS has used his ‘gift year’, the automatic extra year of loan. However, all sources including the SFE website are clear that with Mitigating Circumstances you can apply for a further year.

So he can defo repeat Y3. During the repeat year he can apply for another year of loan to complete his integrated MEng. If denied, he would need to do a separate MSc. I know the latter isn’t what he wants. But it is much, much better than taking on too much next year and crashing.

My mind is boggling slightly at the mix of at home and in person resit exams and exams submitted via photos, but if he does need to sit that combination (either now or in May), I would look to do the 'at home' one in a university study space. Often the libraries or similar have bookable quiet study spaces, and there should be a printer close at hand as well. Ideally practice printing something to it the day before, and know where the second closest printer is just in case of a jam/out of paper/etc. on the day.

DS is apparently not registered with the Office for Students with Disabilities. At my place this is required for granting accommodations.

Oh dear. Registering for this is absolutely key. Staff really can't make any accommodations if the student hasn't let them know officially.

Yes the OP's DS really really needs to get onto this.

I ca understand @RhubarbandC 's consternation, but in my experience, there is always more than one side to these sorts of situations. It's very rarely all down to university screw ups ...

He had a learning plan. Pretty sure he is registered.

Ok so where has my son screwed up exactly?They know he is ND and has MH difficulties
and had extenuating circumstances due to this. It was well documented with evidence. He did retakes successfully ant the end of year 2 and proceeded to the third year on the back of them however he was deregistered at the beginning of year 3 with no timetable which had a detrimental impact. He had to chase to get it sorted and they admitted it was their mistake. Then this year after results said results from last year’s retakes disappeared from his transcript so they issued him with a diploma completely incorrectly. They have admitted it was their mistake again and found said results saying he can now do retakes for his degree.

How exactly can any of this be his fault?