When a student fails – or doesn’t get the grade they were hoping for – it could be for one or more of three categories of reasons.
The first is a bit of bad luck or fate that prevented them from doing well. My car broke down, my parents got divorced, I caught shingles. That sort of thing.
The second is they weren’t good enough or didn’t put the effort in. I couldn’t be bothered, prioritised my Eurovision hobby over study, or maybe just chose the wrong course.
The third is that there was some failing in the teaching/support on offer from the university. The library was bare. The diss supervisor disappeared. The teaching was terrible. Nobody responded to my emails.
On getting their result, they may well attempt to submit an academic appeal.
- If their appeal concerns luck or fate, in some circumstances they may well get another go.
- The appeal isn’t going to contain “I wasn’t good enough / didn’t put the effort in”.
- But if the appeal is mainly about some failing in the teaching/support on offer from the university, the appeal is doomed to fail.
Any SU advisor will tell you how miserable it is having to explain the get out of jail free card to students. Especially because much of the emergent international PGT casework in the space in recent years comes with it additional jeopardy for the student.
When the appeal fails, the message back is always “academic judgement is sacrosanct”. But in protecting that principle, the system effectively institutionally assumes that everyone that any appeal on the basis of failings in the teaching/support on offer is a lie.
“You would say that” is the subtext, and the official line is “well you should have made a complaint”.
But here’s the thing. At that point, why don’t universities routinely treat it as a complaint?
Failed and buried
The basic position in scenarios like this is that students are informed (in some buried T or C) that they have to raise complaints about provision when they happen.
But there’s a million reasons why a student might not want to do so.
They might have raised it informally and got nowhere. It might have been raised by a course rep and got nowhere. They might not know that they have to raise it in good time.
Even if they know they might fear retribution or reprisals if they make it official. These people are marking them, after all.
We might assume that the last two are more acute concerns for international students.
Research on complaints and complainants tells us that there’s five big barriers to complaint making. Opportunity costs, fear/dislike of conflict, fear or retribution/reprisal, a lack of confidence to “take them on” and a lack of information about one’s rights.
All of the above are in short supply for students – and some of the above are obviously bigger issues for international PGTs.
Time is short. Familiarity with UK systems is weak. The threat of deportation looms large, especially with the university in some position of influence over the visa. The (upfront) investment is huge. And so on and so on.
So anyway, back to that appeal. Why don’t universities automatically convert the failed appeal into a complaint?
A growing problem
Now let’s bulk it up a bit. Let’s say a large number of students in a large international cohort fail a module. A raft of appeals comes in, but as above, they’re doomed.
Behind the scenes, eyebrows are raised and brows furrowed. What’s gone wrong here?
- Maybe it’s luck or fate, a chance happening.
- Maybe it’s this cohort of students all being lazy, or broke, or just not putting the work in.
- Maybe it’s a failing in the teaching/support on offer, or a failing via the recruitment of a student not up to the demands of the course.
An internal set of questions might determine that it’s the latter. But would students be told? Would compensation be offered? Even if reps had raised it at the time, that would be treated as feedback rather than a complaint.
And I can see how it might happen. Rapid expansion, a need for cash, large numbers of students with new sorts of support needs, a struggling staff team, an assessment so egregiously failed that no self-respecting set of academics could pass it quietly (because, you know, they do pay a lot, and…)
Maybe that becomes some sort of stalemate. Maybe a group of academics stand their ground, but “the centre” makes clear that the fee income is earmarked for elsewhere, not extra support for that new and demanding cohort.
The problem is that the university “knows” it has failed to uphold its end of the bargain. But not only is it never going to admit that and compensate accordingly, it’s going to take any appeals that come in on that basis and play the get out of jail free card.
I’m not sure that’s OK.
Learning from complaints?
In the OIA good practice framework, there is supposed to be an open and positive culture of listening to feedback and sharing learning that encourages students to have confidence that they will be treated fairly.
Good records are supposed to be kept and learning captured so that appropriate action is taken when issues are identified. Information gathered is supposed to be used to improve services for students and the student experience.
But if I look at the average university annual review of complaints, I can usually find large numbers of failed appeals and little on what was in those failed appeals – and why they failed. And even when I do see it, it’s a category issue – “65% failed because they concerned issues a student should have raised as a complaint”.
I think there’s ten easy fixes.
The first is that students need to know what they’re entitled to. OfS’ B Conditions are actually a good start – if only we took the steps to tell students about them in something approaching accessible language.
The second is that when student representation (ie reps) or feedback (ie module evaluation) raises material that amounts to a complaint (rather than an optional suggestion for the future) it should be handled as such.
The third is that artificial deadlines on when a student can make a complaint about a thing should almost all be relaxed or abolished. They rightly are baffled that “within the academic year that the failure manifested” is sometimes too late.
The fourth is that extra effort should go in on ensuring that international students know their rights and feel supported without threat to enforce them. They’re textbook “vulnerable consumers”, and so special steps need to be taken to reduce the impact of that vulnerability.
The fifth is that material in appeals should always be converted into a complaint if it contains material that would represent a complaint. It shouldn’t be on a student to choose the right process – there should be a duty on providers to make sense of the material.
The sixth is that any resolution to a complaint internally should come with an admittance of failure by the university to all impacted students and compensation as appropriate. If it went wrong for one, it went wrong for all.
The seventh is a duty of candour on staff involved in investigations – I wrote about this a month or so again on the site. The “I could lose my job” fear needs to be on the side of the see-saw that covers up, not the side of the see-saw that fesses up.
And the eighth is that universities’ annual complaints reports should reflect carefully on the material in failed appeals.
The ninth is that there should be a requirement to comply (on a comply or explain basis) with the Good Practice Framework laid out by the OIA – as is the case in many other countries.
And 10? Any review in England of Condition C2 should include the above, and Medr should include the above in its new framework in Wales.
In Scotland, it’s beyond past time that the sector should set up a Scottish branch of the OIA. Complaints handling is an essential aspect of quality (that everyone seems to think is wise to harmonise around the UK), and the “current complaint allocation time” at the SPSO of 14-16 weeks is beyond a joke.
Without the above, the sector doesn’t have the vital safeguard of complaints as a way of whistleblowing what’s happening on its ground, regulators are denied the sort of data it says it gets from the OIA on trends, and it means no university can truly say it’s learning from complaints.
“Teaching/support” is a really broad category, and ‘academic judgement’ (as defined by the OIA) is actually quite narrowly defined. It isn’t quite the Get Out Of Jail Free card you’ve described, and appeals that are classed as a challenge to academic judgement, and nothing else, are rare. I think the above is a useful start but generalises about a lot of things and conflates some stuff that is pretty distinct. There are great reasons for separating academic appeals and ‘service’ complaints; e.g. if a student asks for an academic remedy, to overturn a previously ratified academic decision, the process is necessarily different. There are ways that Universities can improve routes for students to confidently raise early concerns about teaching provision without asking them to lodge formal complaints. This is where the focus should be.
Interesting comment. Whilst it’s true that I haven’t seen academic judgement come into an appeal outcome very often, in my experience this is often headed off in the drafting of the appeal by clued-up SU advice staff. Obviously not every appellant asks for/receives help, but those that do will almost never end up submitting an appeal that involves academic judgement.
In my opinion, one of the biggest issues with academic judgement is the way it can be wheeled out as an instinctive defence of any process involving a decision made by someone who happens to be a practising academic. Where a procedural irregularity has quite clearly taken place, but an institution decides to try and claim it was a matter of academic judgement, we have a serious issue – and here’s where we see the Get Out Of Jail Free line really shining.
There’s a strong suggestion in the OIA Good Practise Framework that appeals that could be classed as complaints should be converted automatically by the institution, so I totally agree. However, I feel the number of appeals that could be classed as a complaint (because they touch on issues of service provision and teaching quality) are in reality quite limited in number? They are there, but most failing appeals truly are disagreeing with academic judgement and disagreeing with the assessor, often despite the moderation process. I think a wider issue is that student life is becoming so hard now that additional consideration/mitigation procedures just aren’t up to snuff to deal with it, so students are forced to turn to appeal as a last ditch attempt to salvage their studies. A more compassionate approach is needed.
I’m in sort of a middle ground at my university (which still ends up with not great outcomes)- the casework team here are very happy to take an appeal forward as a complaint if it relates to a service provision, and will even do that for students without the need for a new form submission. However, this then goes to the complaints officer to be judged on whether it can be investigated, who usually turns around and says it wasn’t timely and they won’t be assigning an investigator to it. So, we have the appearance (or, to be fair to the casework team, the genuine intention) of flexibility and fairness; but in reality students don’t get any extra consideration.
Appeals about administrative failings are relatively straightforward. The student claims that something was done that should not have been or something was not done that should have been or that whatever was done was not done to a standard that might reasonably be expected of a competent professional. Appeals against academic judgement are a different story. A student typically accepts and banks all the marks that are better than they expected but wants to appeal a mark that is lower than the one they were hoping for. They do not raise concerns about some aspect of provision (for example a book is missing from a library) either themselves or via a student rep and present themselves for assessment when a remedy is available. Then, after the result is released, they do raise the issue long after the opportunity to provide the remedy (replacing the book) has passed. The fundamentals of University appeals are no different to any other area and actually compares well to other organisations. Anyone who has ever had to complain to (say) an airline, a train operator or the local council will attest to this.
I’ve seen a lot of academic appeals after a student was told mitigating circumstances were too late. Only to have to wait 6 months for academic decisions rather than the 30 day complaints time limit.
When that mit circumstances is for a reason they didn’t feel comfortable sharing before the exam, e.g sharing their religion or confronting bereavement. I find it bizarre that suddenly the whole process changes.
Surely if an system is to merge mit cric and academic appeals are the most overlapping.
This doesn’t really chime with my experience of appeals.
The universities I’m familiar with routinely refer appeals to be instead treated as complaints (or vice versa), normally depending on the outcome sought, and they don’t reject appeals about support due to academic judgement because that isn’t how academic judgement is defined. Though will be some rejection of appeals about support issues which were not raised at the time, but only after marks were released.
The bit about appeals overviews not including a lot on specifics is familiar though (albeit partly because you’d need to read and analyse hundreds of appeals to review the content, which is a different piece of work to something typically more focussed on volume and type). The only time that has occured in my experience is when there have been a large number of appeals or complaints in relation to the same issue.
Academic judgement shouldn’t be used that way – it applies where the student is arguing they should have received a different mark, not a better service. Appeals which refer to poor service provision can and do become complaints, but there must be some kind of evidence, eg. an email trail where an academic was not responding to requests for support. A mere allegation that “A better academic would have meant I got a better result” isn’t enough by itself.