Appealing a paper

brophs

Hi all,

Brief question for you all. My g/f is in Smurfit, and sat her exams a few weeks ago. She got her results this morning, which were generally very good, but there was one she wasn't happy with, albeit she didn't fail, or anything like that.

This exam is one which she complained about immediately after the exam (by email/phone etc) - a complaint which has been shared by an awful lot of students in her class - and she has been almost universally ignored up to this point.

The issue was that two of the four questions on the paper didn't make sense, or at best were entirely confusing and when read could have been asking for several different things. The language was bizarre in places (think singulars and plurals being mixed up, words used in the wrong context), and the second part of a question appears to ask you to repeat the answer given in the first part.

I know all of this because I spent the better part of a half an hour on the evening after the exam reading it and trying to decipher what the questions were asking for, which is still somewhat unclear, even after all of this time, and in the cold light of day outside of the pressure of an exam.

One of the issues, it seems, is that the professor is not a native English speaker, and as such has made some errors. Someone should have picked these up, but they have gone unchecked and made it into the final exam. He is now simply ignoring the substantive emails, and responding with things like 'I told you to answer each question independently of the others' which, in addition to meaning very little, doesn't address any of the relevant concerns.

So......after that long-winded explanation (apologies!), I'm wondering if there are people here who can advise me how you go about appealing the actual questions set on a paper, as opposed to the marking of a paper. My g/f has been working and doing this course p/t in the evenings, and is sorely disappointed that a year's work is going to yield a pretty average result.

Cheers in advance.

delta_bravo

http://www.ucd.ie/appeals/

taz70

I second what delta-bravo says - get your gf to talk to the Appeals Office and they will let her know whether there is a case for a formal appeal, but this is done on an individual basis.

In the meantime, I would also document every attempt that she and others in the class have made to contact the lecturer (dates/copies of emails etc) and present a class letter to the next person above the lecturer - eg Programme Director or even Head of Subject or Head of School. Don't refer to the fact that the lecturer is not a native English speaker, but rather discuss the process by which exam papers are approved. A friend of mine is a part-time lecturer at UCD and she has to submit exam papers well in advance, which are then scrutinised by a committee and she's asked to make changes - or they just fix poor grammar etc if they find it. Sounds like Smurfit doesn't do that.

convert

taz70 wrote: »

. A friend of mine is a part-time lecturer at UCD and she has to submit exam papers well in advance, which are then scrutinised by a committee and she's asked to make changes - or they just fix poor grammar etc if they find it. Sounds like Smurfit doesn't do that.

You'd be amazed at the number of 'errors' on exam papers which are not picked up by the committee and therefore have to be corrected on the day of the exam. Worse still, the error is only realised when a student queries the question during the course of the exam!

wonderworm

you can;t appeal your results until the final confirmed results are published. did you send in an email to assessment after the exams? or to your programme office?