Reppery

Phew! What a title! This was my fourth meeting this week, making the week one of the busiest I’ve had this year.

The meeting was nearly three hours long and various topics were discussed from exams and resits to degree evaluations, the new Careers Advisory Service and achievement scholarships.

Most of the contents of the meeting will probably not be relevant to most students, so I won’t bore you with all of the details, but there were a couple of interesting areas of discussion which you may want to know more about.

Firstly, as you might know, people who are resitting exams due to failure and people who are deemed not to have sat an exam (effectively being given a free resit which counts as their first attempt) are treated differently, and this difference is even evident between schools in the same faculty. These differences range from the exam you take through to whether any coursework element can be resubmitted. For example, if you fail a particular module, your resit will be in the form of another exam paper, but you may not be allowed to resubmit your coursework, or if you can, you may not be allowed to edit it. For people deemed not to have sat an exam, the paper may be different to those for resits and a coursework element may be allowed depending on the progress on it when the extenuating circumstance was reported.

All of these inconsistencies obviously lead to confusion on the part of students and more administrative work for staff. This is why the meeting yesterday included a discussion on whether these two classes of resits should be treated the same, with the exception of treating people deemed not to have sat as having done their first exam rather than a resit. I argued that it would be better not to differentiate, and that this would be fairer to students. The outcome of this is yet to be seen.

The second point is about achievement scholarships. These are sums of money that the university awards to students who are the top achievers across the university. There is no quota of students who must come from within a particular faculty, and as a result, the Faculty of Science seems to have more than an average number of students receiving these awards. However, there is always the argument that this could turn around, and that a university-level award is seen as being much more difficult to attain. A guaranteed number of awards for each faculty may make the award seem like a more reachable target and may motivate students more than the current system. Views on this are still very polarised and nobody has asked the students what they think, which is what I’m asking now. Do you think it’s better to have a university-level award as it is now, or to have faculty awards instead? Email me your comments!