UCU’s national Marking and Assessment Boycott is having a significant impact at the University of Glasgow. Despite making initial statements to staff and students claiming the quality of marking and degrees would be upheld, the University’s Senior Management Group has now privately and selectively released a boycott ‘mitigation’ strategy, but not made it public.
We condemn the ‘mitigation’ strategy in the strongest possible terms. In reality, it is not a mitigation strategy, but a strike-breaking strategy that adversely affects students. It undermines their hard work to complete assessments and degrees. We are outraged that senior management prefers to hand out dodgy degrees, rather than work with UCU Glasgow and publicly call for UCEA to return to the national negotiating table.
Senior Management’s initial ‘mitigation’ plan was to bring in alternative markers, seeing staff grade without the relevant expertise and knowledge in the subject area. This in itself undermines the integrity of the marking and feedback process.
Given the effectiveness of the boycott, alternative markers could not cover all the necessary marking and the new ‘mitigation’ strategy outlines processes to progress students with missing marks at exam boards. The guidance outlined in the strategy is unclear in several places and will inevitably be inconsistently applied, resulting in different students receiving different treatment.
The measures outlined in the ‘mitigation’ strategy are detrimental to students and disrespectful of the intense hard work they have put in, particularly in the final year of their degree. As teachers, we know the effort students put into assessments and it is devastating to see them treated as disposable. Additionally, the impact is highly uneven which is unfair to the student body. One student may get a degree, another a dodgy degree and someone else may not get their degree at all despite putting in the same work.
Some degrees might be awarded without the compulsory dissertation or project report component being marked. Projects and dissertations take up to a year of hard work. In some cases staff who are not subject specialists are being used to give pass/fail assessments for dissertations. Staff and external examiners have raised serious concerns, but senior management who have taken over the running of some boards are confirming the grades regardless. They are overriding standard processes to continue a degree factory.
Quorum for exam boards has dropped the requirement for external examiners, who act as an essential external quality assurance check. There is significant risk that downsized exam boards, potentially lacking external examiners and internal examiners with the full range of relevant subject expertise, fail to identify incorrect grades being given to students by inexperienced or markers without the relevant subject expertise. Some externals who have attended exam boards have highlighted these concerns so management are well aware of them.
Students will receive devalued, dodgy degrees so senior management can claim they graduated on time. We are furious at this treatment of students who deserve to have their work fairly graded by the usual specialist staff and to receive the degree they deserve. This could lead to the value of degrees in some areas not being recognised by accreditation bodies and could therefore affect the ability of students to obtain employment.
As we have repeatedly seen this year, University senior management is readily prepared to ignore student welfare and standards, e.g. through over-recruiting and the subsequent accommodation crisis. Now the SMG has now shown it prefers to treat students as a commodity to be moved as fast as possible along a production line, issuing dodgy degrees or not issuing degrees at all, rather than work with UCU to promote a fair settlement. Nonetheless, we remain committed to resolving this ongoing national dispute over real term pay cuts, inequality, casualisation and overwork.