Fair Outcomes for Students Campaign

Who's making it happen

Description

Fair outcomes for students is our campaign to ensure students get the best deal for their exams and assessment in 2021 and beyond. Students studies have been signifcantly disrupted by covid-19 and the University must recognise this. See the full information about the project on our dedicated webpage here.

What have we done so far?

Following our calls to the university to commit to rescaling and/or reweighting all exams and assessment in Hilary and Trinity 2021, we’re pleased to see that the University has released details on their plans for mandatory rescaling across all cohort.

Paper averages adjusted:

This policy, which is outlined on the Coronavirus Teaching & Learning page of the University’s website, guarantees that paper averages for medium and large cohorts which are below a small average range will be brought in line to the pre-pandemic average. Furthermore, special guidance has been issued to examiners regarding preventing a downturn in the number of firsts from pre-pandemic years and preventing failure in first preliminary examination.  

 

University will accept 'explanatory statements'

For students with certain coursework submissions, the university has also indicated that it will allow for the submission of explanatory statements which highlight any barrier they’ve faced in completing their work. These will be provided to examiners during the marking phase, which means they will have an impact directly on student marks, not just classifications.  

 

Improvements to Mitigating Circumstances process

Finally, after our calls for a better mitigating circumstances process, the University has agreed to make the process easier for students, by removing the need to provide independent medical evidence, and removing the need for students to seek and gain college approval for submitting Mitigating Circumstances notices to Examiners (MCEs).

 

Updates

26/04/21
Oxford SU have now delivered a large part of this project through securing a number of exam and assessment changes for 2021 which can be found at: https://www.oxfordsu.org/fair-outcomes-for-students/ Our focus is now on supporting students doing exams and assessment this Trinity Term by boosting availability of study and exam space in Oxford as well as ensuring online resources continue to be available. - Ben

26/04/21
Work continues to be done in supporting students in their exams and assessments this year. We are shifting focus to ensure that students have good study spaces available to them across their colleges, libraries and departments leading up to their exams. Furthermore, we will be working to ensure that helpful materials for Trinity term exams are well publicised to students. We are also planning on opening a feedback channel in order to get student issues quickly addressed this Trinity. This work has been carried forward so far in the past few weeks in Education Steering Group, and in meetings with senior university officials. - Tucker

11/05/21
We have reached out to all divisions, and representatives of the teaching space coordination group to discuss the opening status of central university run buildings. Furthermore, we have been working with the Libraries to ensure that their study spaces are as open to as many students as possible. In the past week, we have additionally been escalating student concerns over the new library suspension policy, and have received positive responses from their team and await further updates about forthcoming decisions on an exemption from suspension for students registered with DAS and regarding improvements to their attendance checking processes.

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