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Results!!
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Byrno wrote:I'm getting seriously pissed off waiting for the results at this stage. I don't think the College care about us non-modular students, that they almost see us as an inconvenience. We are "the forgotten year"!
Funny you should say that, I was red in the face with rage last night about all this and wrote the letter below - think I'll send it to the Observer - it makes almost the exact point that you just did
JHJ wrote:Sir,
I write to you with the vague hope of somehow venting the unbridled frustration and rage that has been visited on many final year (or “traditional”) students by the utter shambles of the UCD administration system.
During the fiasco of the exams period itself, the phrase “Well, at least it can’t possibly get any worse than this” sprang to many minds. Inexcusably late timetables, four final exams in one day, rugby scrums at exam centres to get table numbers and piles of coursework being due on the same day as numerous finals were only a selection of the many complaints and grievances received. But when the time for results rolled around, it became clear that this fiasco was only an appetiser for the main disaster.
Let me be quite clear about this. No “breakdown in communication” is an adequate excuse. No “transitional system” can be blamed. And no empty promises of committees and post-match analyses are enough to make up for the excruciating experiences of many students as they toil daily through the sewage of the exam system to discover even simple information.
We are told, via SIS, that all undergraduate students will have their results by 5pm on January 29th. Perhaps naively, we assume we are being told the truth. However, unbeknownst to us, the actual plan is to give final years their results at a later date. I am at a loss to understand UCD’s desire to mystify this fact. Surely, to type an extra line on the SIS system informing us of this great secret would have taken less than ten seconds, and saved hundreds of final years the stress and angst of searching for results that were never meant to be available in the first place.
We are told that we don’t have our results because of the sheer amount of exams to be marked over the Christmas period. With the greatest of respect to the younger years, (and with considerably less respect to the powers that be in this university), I fail to see why their scripts have obviously taken precedence over ours.
We are told that this lateness is due to our “transitional system”. A handy abstract sort of thing to pass the blame onto, I suppose, but unfortunately it doesn’t really stand up in court.
The only material difference I can see between our system and that of second years is that I receive 2:1s and 2:2s, while second years get A’s and B’s. We both have six classes, called modules, per semester. We both have a certain number of exams at Christmas. Yet the second years are afforded the great courtesy of having their results conveyed to them in an acceptable manner at a reasonable time, while we are forced to struggle through a quagmire of bureaucracy only to repeatedly come up against an impenetrable brick wall.
Then finally, some of us are told that we can’t have our results at all, or not in full, because they are only provisional. We know they are provisional. We are all big enough, ugly enough and sick enough of UCD to know that if there’s a chance that our results might change, they probably will and going on past experiences with UCD administration, probably not for the better either. But a vague indication of how we are doing, midway through our final year, with our degrees at stake, might be a nice gesture amidst a swamp of blatant indifference to our needs.
And if the problem is that the exam board hasn’t been held yet? Here’s a thought – Hold the damned exam board, and put us all out of our misery. Could it possibly be as impossible to do as we are consistently being told?
The bottom line is quite simple; even though it is something that UCD’s PR obsessed hierarchy will never admit to. We are a thorn in their side, an unfortunate and ugly ink blot on the face of their fresh copybook of free electives, palm tree advertisements and the seductive prospects of moving UCD up a few places in some irrelevant world league tables. As far as they are concerned, the sooner we are gone and forgotten about the better, and if it means we have to be messed around, misled, brushed over and misinformed on a perpetual basis in the process, then so be it.
It is with this in mind that I will say goodbye to UCD at the end of this semester holding the same disdain for the institution as the institution itself evidently holds for many of its students.
Yours etc,
Jane Horgan-Jones
UCDSU Education Officer 05/06, and unfortunately 3rd Arts.0 -
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