Education Officer Blog

On the 4 January 2021 Boris Johnson announced that England was going back into its third national lockdown. Due to the record high infection rates across the country this lockdown is the strictest the country has seen this academic year with stay-at-home orders and most notably for university students all education (apart from a few identified courses) to be moved to online delivery. This has resulted in the government advising students to stay away from the university campus and the city of Bath (if they are able to). Consequently, many students will have to sit their exams from a less than adequate study space.

Therefore, we are calling for the University of Bath to revise and enhance the no-detriment policy for 2020 – 21’s assessments and examinations. Whilst the efforts from staff at the University of Bath to produce high quality online content is recognised and greatly appreciated by the student community, the learning experience has altered significantly, from having to adjust to a new blended approach to learning to all exams now online. As a result we have seen a recognised workload increase for nearly all students, and changes creating an immeasurable amount of stress on students who have been concerned about the effects of these changes on their grades even before this third lockdown was announced.

Alongside the impacts of the changing environment of Higher Education, we are becoming increasingly aware that this pandemic is having a detrimental impact on students’ mental health due to the frequent introduction and changing of restrictions and lockdowns at a local and national level Mental health has been identified as an area of concern for all, including students. With the introduction of the current national lockdown additional impacts such as less sunlight, uncertainty about the new coronavirus variant and more restrictive measures coming into force with no clear end date in sight could have a significant impact on our student community’s mental health. On top of this, many of our students have not been able to return to study in Bath or participate in the In-Person Teaching sessions during semester one which has contributed to feelings of isolation and disconnection from their peers. These are just some of the factors which will have hindered members of our student community from achieving grades which reflect their true ability.

We recognise that measures were introduced to support students such as IMCs and deadline extensions. Whilst there are concerns around the risk of grade inflation, we feel that it is important that the university now recognises the unprecedented educational environment the student community have been facing and incredibly hard our student community has worked and will continue to do so during the rest of the pandemic.

We therefore believe that the lack of further mitigating measures risks widening gaps caused by the various inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic and provides a reputational risk of University of Bath students not being properly supported during this time.

We are calling on the University of Bath to:

• Reintroduce No Detriment Safety Nets (for at least the current semester 1 assessment period)
• Allow a 2 week no evidence automatic extensions for all assessments 
• To take into consideration Covid-19 disruption during the appeals process.
• Allow no penalty resits in the supplementary assessment period.
• IMCs to be awarded for students who have disruptions to their working environments
• A more flexible window for exam submission.