It is with dismay that we read David Duncan’s update on industrial action on 20th June. Instead of genuinely engaging with us, Senior Management prefers to offer statistics. We have our own.

Hundreds of actual staff members, not statistics, have taken part in the boycott, fighting for all of us who have seen our pay cut in real terms year in year out for well over a decade. The latest 5.4% real-terms pay cut (even CPI inflation – never mind the higher RPI – was 10.4% in February when UCEA imposed the 5% pay settlement on UCU members) is just the icing on the cake of the never-ending spiral of worsening pay and conditions for staff in higher education.

Here’s another one – we’ve seen staff (without marking so not on the MAB), whose “official” workload is already well over 110%, being told that they need to do cover marking because it “wasn’t at 120%” (yet!). A 120% workload is a 6-day working week – not as a one off, but as an average over the year – something we thought we had got rid of for good in the early 20th century! We need action on overwork at Glasgow now, not still higher student numbers in 2024/5 and the promise of cake tomorrow in some mythical future utopia.

Meanwhile management’s statistics mask the devaluation of those degrees that are being awarded through marking without full quality assurance by the wrong staff, risking a tsunami of preventable mistakes and appeals, and even compromise of degree accreditation processes. Reports of chaotic exam boards, collective letters by staff members detailing the disregard for academic standards, and external examiners refusing to sign off on the integrity of mitigation processes should be indications of the need for a rethink by SMG.

We are instead told that the sector cannot afford anything but the continuation of the practice – established since 2009 – of making real-terms pay cuts every academic year. In the week after the public learned, many for the first time, about the eye-watering sums being raised by Scottish universities, largely through unsustainable rises in overseas PGT student numbers, such words ring hollow; this is the same strategy that left our students homeless at the start of the year and now UofG proposes to graduate them with IOUs instead of degrees. The “justification” for our senior management’s refusal to encourage compromise is that some universities were not so lucky – but poorer universities like Glasgow Caledonian have publicly called for UCEA to return to negotiations*, so why can’t ours? And the sector negotiation framework in any event allows for individual universities who cannot afford an increase to defer them until they can, so this can’t be used to stop a better sector-wide deal.

With PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. It is not too late for our senior managers to change course. Doing so requires constructive engagement with our branch – working together to promote what would be best for the University of Glasgow and for the sector. We believe the first step along that path is a public commitment to negotiations and a statement that we all believe that the staff who kept the university going through the years of the pandemic deserve better in the context of the biggest cost of living crisis in memory.

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.

This is our new UCU Glasgow blog – currently still in progress!

February 2020 report into the realities of casualisation at the University of Glasgow available here: UCU Glasgow Annual Casualisation Report 2020

October 2021 report: UCU Glasgow Annual Casualisation Report 2021