Members of the University and College Union at Cardiff University, who are engaged in the marking and assessment boycott, say students are being failed by management’s attempts to ignore workers’ concerns.
By Adwitiya Pal. Cover image: members of the UCU strike earlier this year, by Adwitiya Pal.
Senior lecturers at Cardiff University have told voice.wales that assessment standards are being lowered in an attempt to break a marking and assessment boycott, with one saying: “They [management] don’t care where the marks come from or how justifiable they are, they just want them in the spreadsheet as long as they vaguely appear to be correct.”
In a statement, in full below, Cardiff University said that, “many students will receive their marks, in full, and will not be impacted.”
A month ago, voice.wales exposed Cardiff University’s punitive attempts to stop workers taking industrial action, when staff were threatened with 100% pay deductions for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. They are taking the action short of strike over pay and terms and conditions.
But despite the fact that the academics taking part in the action are still working the majority or even over their normal hours, they are now seeing their pay packets cut in half by the University.
But some have spoken to voice.wales about another way in which the Russell Group institution is looking to undermine the action – by neglecting the rigorous procedures to hand students their grades.
Lectures have revealed that standards are being lowered so that Cardiff University can ignore workers’ concerns whilst still processing students’ work. At the request of the workers, their names have been changed.
Dr Michael Curtis, senior lecturer at Cardiff University with more than 30 years of experience told voice.wales about how his department was handling grades of the final year students’ projects, which comprise 50% of their total marks.
Under normal conditions, the projects and the students’ presentations would be marked by two independent markers and a third chair would adjudicate between the two marks. Dr Curtis, participating in the boycott, says that he is certain that this isn’t the case this time.
“About a quarter of the projects have only been marked by just a single person. There are no two independent marks, which were then compared and moderated,” says Dr Curtis. “We have two markers for a reason, to get marks that are consistent. I wouldn’t particularly have much faith in the mark when it’s just one person on their own.”
Dr Curtis’ department has also gone on to change exam papers of certain core modules at very short notice, to remove any questions that he was lecturing on so his boycott could be mitigated against. “Students are not being assessed on the whole module, no university should be handing out grades and degrees if students are not being thoroughly assessed,” he says.
Incomplete assessments aren’t happening in just Dr Curtis’ department. Senior Lecturer Dr Sharon Thomas says that there have been plans of invoking the ‘no-detriment policy’, last seen during the pandemic to ensure that students were not academically disadvantaged and allow them to get their grades and degrees with an averaged score on the basis of a fewer credits.
“These rules are there for emergencies, not for something that’s completely preventable and negotiable,” says Dr Thomas. “What is the point of a degree from Cardiff University if you’re missing credits and never got the feedback that you deserved?”
Feedback, according to Dr Thomas is another topic that the lecturers are not happy about. Last year, when staff at Queen Mary University, London went on a marking and assessment boycott, the university approached agency workers to fill in and mark students’ work. However, there were reports of students receiving a single-word remark, like ‘excellent’ or ‘perfect’ on their assignments spanning several thousand words.
“When I’m reading my students’ work, I would give paragraphs and paragraphs of feedback. I would give them in-text comments wherever possible — especially important for first and second year students who want to improve as they progress further. But the standard of feedback now is going to be much, much lower,” Dr Thomas says.
Cardiff University, in its FAQ section for staff states that it has the option to not only reallocate grading not covered by workers participating in the action to other staff members, but also through “additional staff where this can be practically arranged. e.g. staff who have retired, casual staff, agency workers or PGRs [PhD students]”.
Dr Gavin McGuirk, senior lecturer, believes that all of these alternatives are worrying. “Staff who have retired are not up to date with the course and what are the current grading structures we are following, casual staff are going to be falsely incentivised as they are on insecure contracts, PhD students need support and supervision from senior staff,” he says, before adding, “The less I say about agency workers the better.”
Reallocating work to lecturers not taking part in the boycott is also problematic, as Dr Curtis argues that everyone at the university is already so overworked that asking them to do other people’s marking doesn’t make sense.
He says, “People in the department are expected to be overworking. We are expected to teach, do research and mark. And I’m happy doing all of it, but the amount and the way the university expects you to do all this is unreasonable and demeaning.”
“However, whenever the teaching and marking workload gets heavy, it is implicit that we would spend less time doing research that we should be doing or want to be doing alongside everything else as well. So to act as if the university is trying to keep the total workload down, they will ask us to cut down on our research time.”
The University’s FAQs also state: “Heads of Schools/departments can, and are likely to, ask staff who are not participating in ASOS [action short of strike] to prioritise certain work and this includes the work of colleagues who are participating in ASOS… other work not considered essential is paused during the period of action.”
A fundamental part of this sort of behaviour, Dr Curtis says, is because of the university bosses who want students to graduate with minimum fuss amidst the strike. “They want them to be happy, because they are the customers. And the customers can’t be unhappy or unsatisfied. They want to hand them the product that they’ve paid for somehow, but don’t care if the quality is not up to the standards,” says Dr Curtis.
“The communications that our head of the department has received directly from the Vice-Chancellor is to get the marking done with as little disruption as possible,” he adds. “The feeling from above is they just want to get the marks in, doesn’t matter where they come from. They don’t care where the marks come from or how justifiable they are, they just want them in the spreadsheet as long as they vaguely appear to be correct.”
Dr McGuirk believes it’s a reflection of how most public sector bodies like Royal Mail, the railways and the NHS are being run in the country and how workers everywhere are being treated unfairly. “They’re narrowing everything down to this idea of making money, cutting costs, maximising profits and operating like a business and it’s really shocking. It’s completely offensive to the idea of universities as public institutions that exist for the benefit of society,” he says.
“They want to get the students out the door regardless of whether the marking’s done properly or not,” says Dr McGuirk. “What makes the University a university is the staff and the students. By reacting like this, they are hurting staff and destroying the goodwill that is needed for the university to operate. At the same time, they’re hurting the students by prolonging this industrial dispute, and not giving them what they have a right to expect, that is, to have their work fairly assessed and be given proper feedback.”
Dr McGuirk says even the handling of the pay deductions by the university has been unprofessional. The staff weren’t told how long they were going to get their 50% pay deducted for. Now there’s information that many lecturers might end up getting their pay deducted for a month, some even more.
And because of these unfair deductions and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association’s (UCEA) unwillingness to even come to the table to negotiate, Dr McGuirk says that they are being forced to take steps to further the escalation.
He says: “We would hope that Cardiff University would be a voice of reason and try and talk the UCEA to negotiate with us, but we would at least expect them to not to cause even more damage with these punitive deductions.”
“However, they are saying that ‘we don’t value you’, they’ve been saying that for years and now it’s a national issue. This indicates that the Vice Chancellor is in bed with the Vice Chancellors of other universities, and they think they can stand this out. Therefore they are being draconian and unwilling to change, but that’s not going to resolve the problem.”
Against this backdrop, Cardiff UCU this week announced a significant escalation in the dispute.
“We’ve been left with no option but to notify the university that we will be calling a week of strike during the graduation ceremonies this summer, and then during clearing and then also at the Welcome Week in September,” says Dr McGuirk.
“This is something that hurts us because we spent years helping students through their degrees and we’d like to see them on the day they graduate. We want to congratulate them, we want to see their families. The students also value the staff and would’ve been expecting us to be there to congratulate them on graduating.”
Dr Thomas agrees, saying that because of the university’s attempts to ignore the union’s demands, they are denying the students the opportunity to be graded as well as lecturers to follow their students’ work.
“I’ve worked with my students closely for so long and I had been quite excited to hear about their plans developing, but I don’t get to read them now,” she says. “Marking assignments is not always fun, but it’s a culmination of a lot of hard work, and we as academics value that.”
She adds: “But ultimately, I think we had to put pressure on the university, and once again at the cost of our pay. We’re getting 50% of the pay deducted but that’s not proportionate to what marking is to my workload. I would anyway be going through assignments beyond my working hours, usually on my weekends.
“In the past, the university has been able to mitigate some of the shorter industrial action, but this is becoming harder for them now. We have been fighting for conditions so that we’re able to provide better education to students, and the university is going and doing just the opposite. So that’s why we are at this point, so that hopefully, we can provide a better future for our students.”
A Cardiff University spokesperson said: “The University’s priority is to ensure that students receive degrees which are valid and reliable and are of an equivalent standard to degrees awarded in previous years. We are doing everything possible to ensure that all assessments are marked. Many students will receive their marks, in full, and will not be impacted. The University is taking measured and careful mitigating actions to address potential disruption arising from the marking and assessment boycott. The University will only award degrees where students can demonstrate achievement of programme learning outcomes and have been awarded the requisite number of credits. This is consistent with degrees awarded in previous years and in line with similar actions taken at other universities.”
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