Getting MAB victims into their gowns and out of the door will have long term consequences
Jim is an Associate Editor at Wonkhe
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In comparison to the “no detriment” (yeah, but also no benefit of exit acceleration either) and “no just wait till the marks are ready” solutions, the “just get it marked” thing at least appears to have resolved the issue to the moderate satisfaction of students and regulators.
It’s certainly those in the indefinite delay camp that have been picking up the worst of the press coverage.
But I think there’s a looming problem coming for many of those in the “just get it marked” camp. And that’s that academics and students tend to talk to each other.
Great to see you
They bump into each other at the graduation ceremony. They add each other as friends on social media. They follow each other on social media. They seek and supply references, see each other in the supermarket and staff might even be teaching them next year when the undergrad starts their postgrad course or the PGT student becomes a PGR.
And in some cases, students directly approach staff and vice versa to discuss the assessment and marks they’ve been given.
The question that raises is – what if the student got X in a piece of work, and the staff member that would have marked it says that if they’d not been on the MAB, they’d have got Y?
What if said staff explain that the markers can’t have understood the assessments properly if they didn’t design them? What if the student asks why the written feedback doesn’t address the assessment criteria and the MAB-participating staff agree?
What if students see random markers being brought in from other departments or universities? What if the written feedback they saw on drafts is totally different in tone or substance (or summative marks) from the final version?
What’s that smell?
Two problems emerge. The first is that regardless of whether alternative and doubtless technically robust alternative regs have been followed, marks have to smell right to retain credibility.
There’s a reason why league tables tend to always have the same 30 or so universities in the top ten, and there’s a reason why a student working on a dissertation that has followed all the feedback and informal commentary that’s cruising to an 80 per cent mark will raise their eyebrows at a 50 per cent mark.
But even in those circumstances, the alternative arrangements are more often than not being communicated in an “in principle” way. If a university says that its alternative regs still maintain subject and assessment expertise and appropriate moderation, students are going to want to know the detail. How? Who? When? What training? What expertise? And so on.
It might be embarrassing enough to reveal the ingredients of the sausages at the best of times. But when a couple of people end up being sick on them and the supplier says “well the recipe has changed”, the supplier isn’t going to get away with saying “but the ingredients were broadly similar and maintain our high sausagey standards”.
At that point those vomiting will want to know precisely what ingredients are now in the sausages. In detail.
If that’s even more embarrassing to reveal, or those doing the reassurance don’t really know in detail themselves because it’s been delegated to the relevant department, faced with a gap in information folk will fear the worst.
And that will be exacerbated by academic staff who either can’t face telling a student that they thought their final mark would be borderline too, or genuinely believe the student would have got a better mark if they’d have marked it.
Yeah but process
It simply isn’t credible to just say “alt regs, academic judgement” etc if a student has testimony from actual academic staff that suggests they’d have got a first rather than a fail or if the staff are saying their work has been marked by people that don’t know how to do it.
As well as a “reasonable skill and care” issue, it creates a trust issue. And in many ways the magic of academic judgement and students’ inability to challenge it are all based on maintaining high levels of trust.
So as that trust unravels over the next few months as the interactions increase, I suspect it’s universities in this camp that will have the bigger problem on their hands than the delayers.
Some things would help. In England and Wales, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) really does need to set out in dayglo the circumstances under which a student can challenge a MAB mark – which presumably are about robust process(es).
That then implies that universities need to have set out revised processes in detail for students, and then explain when asked precisely how they’ve been followed. That may not involve saying “well someone called Jim Dickinson marked it” but it does involve explaining what sort of people have been drafted in, how they were briefed on the assessments set, and how moderation has worked in more detail than students have routinely been supplied with now.
Frankly, the smartest solution would be to allow students to lodge academic appeals over academic judgement, and to resolve them once the boycott is off. That would involve an enormous climbdown, because it implies that the marks as supplied now can’t be relied on. But if they really can’t be relied on, better to proactively enable students to challenge them now, surely?
When students reflect on why they did well or badly, it’s rarely the marking itself or the system that underpins it that gets identified as the issue. It’s the sliding doors moments of not quite revising enough, or getting your head down for the last stretch of the diss.
But given the final classification can have so much of an impact on some students’ trajectories, I’d assert that the sector ought to prefer students’ reflection not to be “if only they hadn’t messed up my marking” for the rest of their lives as they gaze down on their student loan statement.
Isn’t the main issue with this that most uni’s have very time sensitive regulations on appeals (usually 2-3 weeks after exam board max) which means that a chat even at graduation is probably too late for an appeal to be lodged? Let alone over a chat when the grad is now on a PGT module. Plus if an exam board chair approved the grades, the testimony of someone who wasn’t directly involved in the grading process is unlikely to be enough to sway an appeal, especially if the person is also hardly objective given they Mabbed in part to generate this kind of issue… (Then there’s the problem that some of them will have been on strike for 4-5 weeks in some cases in the runup to submission). Plus, Uni’s have to be able to get people to stand in for grading because of illness etc, you can’t ever say “only the person who designed this module can grade it”. I’m just not sure we’re going to see many appeals like this being carried.
There are always appeals each year because students don’t like the marks they have received and there are even some where they have spoken to a friendly academic at another institution who said it deserved a higher mark. These have all been (rightly) rejected. In the present conditions the most appropriate avenue of appeal is not against academic judgement, I would argue, but procedural irregularity; considering the appropriateness of the markers and the mechanism for appointing them. If those markers are appropriately qualified, then fair enough, if they aren’t then the appeal needs closer consideration.
None of that changes the fact that you are fundamentally right and it will damage faith in the marking process, but that, presumably, is part of the point and actually may not be a bad thing.
Fully agreed re procedural irregularity, though I think that this likely will not work, as HoDs and similar will say that they chose graders with sufficient expertise, kept them anon for (genuine) risk of harassment, and will also claim they did that under significant time constraints (e.g. if UCU MABbers announced late, with the intent of trying to stop replacements being found).
Without wanting to sound too snarky, and not to fully union-blame (though I do think the mess UCU are in and their obvious weakness are of their own making), this is why doing a MAB on a dispute that’s so difficult to win was always ridiculously high-risk, and why it was absolutely essential for UCU to have guaranteed buy-in and critical mass at *every* institution before proceeding. This was actually Jo Grady’s plan, and it might have worked like it did last time in 06 – but the incoherent decision-making systems in UCU and the prevalence of people in these systems who take every IA mandate as an immediate strike mandate meant that an awful lot of members simply couldn’t afford to join in after losing substantial amounts of pay already in 22-3. That, combined with only 56% in favour of continuing the IA, meant that there just hasn’t been enough take-up to disrupt the sector enough to really make a sufficient difference to force the employers’ hand (obviously some parts of some institutions, with high density of membership, have been badly disrupted, but it’s increasingly clear this is a minority). And employers were also obviously ready with deductions to match the level of disruption – UCU view the MAB as a last resort escalation and, while 100% indefinite is ott, it’s nonetheless the case that Uni’s can easily claim that the level of disruption means the big pay cuts are justified.
UCU needed from the start to be realistic with their membership about what was possible in these negotiations, but instead have actively misled their members and thus students too into thinking this dispute can be settled (of course it’s now 5 fights, not 4, to include the reinstatement of all MAB deductions, total lunacy if you actually want things settled).
Just something I forgot to say re the article: “if a student has testimony from actual academic staff that suggests they’d have got a first rather than a fail” and ” a student working on a dissertation that has followed all the feedback and informal commentary that’s cruising to an 80 per cent mark will raise their eyebrows at a 50 per cent mark” – realistically this is a very extreme way of painting the situation I think. In reality there will be nowhere near this level of discrepancy. What we’re tending to hear are people on Twitter saying ‘previous years in general did better on that assessment’ but this is not enough for an appeal.
Naysayer, I agree with your last comment in particular. We have had testimony like that in the past outside of the MAB. Sometimes students underperform, sometimes, the advice they were given is inaccurate or inappropriate. Occasionally the student could be right, but it is hard to prove and say definitively that they should have had x mark when there was nothing wrong with the process that led to them getting that mark.
Jim’s article assumes the MAB has had a significant impact. The attempt to hold students hostage, however, has largely failed for reasons discussed in other articles. Adjustments along the lines of those claimed in the piece are comparatively rare. In any case, “no detriment” does what it says and efforts to weaponise students further (ie encouraging them to appeal or to take legal action) are similarly destined to fail.
Yes – universities were ready for the mab in 2 main ways. A lot of them knew there wouldn’t be sufficient buy in based on branches at several uni’s, who had a mab mandate in summer 2022, not going ahead with them, meaning uni’s with low numbers on strike (based on payroll, I emphasize) would have a solid idea of low participation in mab, meaning they could plan to reallocate marks (which is distasteful but not scabbing per se, as the mab is asos). This immediately demonstrates a huge problem with mab as sector-wide – for every Edinburgh, itself limited in impact, there are as many, if not more, uni’s where there has basically been no impact on degree results. The second, deductions, is well established, ie ucu see it as an escalation from strikes (describing it as a nuclear button), and it’s intentional partial performance, so uni’s were ready with mostly hardline pay deductions which, even if unpalatable, are clearly quite effective as a deterrent – the uni’s also knew a lot of staff had been on strike for weeks in 22-23. It is genuinely baffling that ucu have immediately fallen into a trap of adding “repay deductions” to their list of demands in negotiations – this might have worked in a few local branches last year but mostly followed actual strikes over this – it is just making #settlethedispute *less* likely.
But it’s also obvious from the slightly desperate ucu retweeting of very isolated clips and images from graduations that this is not actually an action that is widely, actively supported by students and that it really hasn’t disrupted sufficiently to give ucu much leverage.
The leverage they do have is I guess strike action in freshers week and week 1 teaching – but given programmes are being cut owing to numbers, a guaranteed way to immediately lose scores of students is possibly the only worse idea in this dispute than adding “no deductions” to an already ridiculous list of grievances.
Interesting to look at the polling on pubic support/opposition during the industrial action. Support for the UCU action remains low with consistent negative polling on a par with train drivers and barristers. This contrasts with consistent positive polling for NHS staff and teachers. While the level of public support is not the only factor, where it is negative observance of industrial action is likely to be less than when it is positive. Poll details can be seen here:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2023/07/13/strikes-tracker-support-has-been-consistent-beginn
I don’t think many people even know uni lecturers have been taking IA – certainly at the peak of the mab lots of my fairly well-informed friends had no knowledge of the MAB. But I think this is also because UCU have been in constant dispute on multiple issues for over five years now, and until this year it was (stupidly) disaggregated meaning many uni’s weren’t experiencing the IA anyway.
After a certain point, it’s hard to keep a media narrative interesting, and it’s also the case that the 4 fights are a much harder sell to outsiders than the USS issue was. I mean saying “we’re on strike over massive cuts to our pensions” is one thing, but “we’re on strike over pay” but also bundling in various pay gaps, workload AND ‘casualisation’ makes it very difficult to get the message across clearly and effectively in the media, especially a media which is generally hostile to IA and to universities anyway. That means you need proper IA strategy and a proper media strategy too and ucu have neither.
I know part of your role is to be a polemicist Jim, but the opening paragraph of this piece is spectacularly unhelpful. As a member of staff at a University that has had to work through MAB I can tell you no-one is feeling remotely smug. We’re all knackered from working to ensure the disruption that this cohort of students has experienced could be minimised as far as possible. Don’t lazily play into the stereotype of an uncaring management elite.