In a post I wrote earlier this year, I recounted my clumsy path to finding openness within my role in student support. I admittedly carried similar preconceptions to Sam, who expressed that their ability to be open in their role is ‘confined to the guides, policies and practices of my line manager, her line manager, the School, the Faculty and so on’.
As part of the department that handles Mitigating Circumstances (MC) applications in the school of Arts, Languages and Cultures, I can recognise my role’s contribution to the concept of openness. However, I debate how much autonomy I have over the openness am I able to practice in my role, given the boundaries of the MC administrative process.
A quick refresher on Mitigating Circumstances –
MC is a process that allows students to apply for mitigation when personal circumstances occur that affect their exams, assessments or attendance and teaching activities. Within this application, the student can request for an extension on an assessment deadline or an opportunity to re-sit the assessment without a capped grading.
The student is required to send supporting documentation and evidence to our email to verify their circumstances. We process the application, and the students’ case is discussed at a MC committee meeting we hold as a team. We discuss each request, and where necessary, take action to mitigate for any impact on the student’s performance.
As I was saying...
In parallel to exploring openness within MC for this submission, I conducted a report for the Local Academic Culture (LAC) unit I am taking as part of the PGCert in Higher Education. My report aimed to review and assess the MC process from an administrative standpoint, and provide recommendations based on data collected from colleagues and wider reading to improve the process.
Coincidentally, when looking at the MC process in a reflective practice with my colleagues, I found that the frustrations we felt about the process directly linked to the inability to practice openness and flexibility in the way we would like to. This consequently hinders us from providing (in our opinion, and what we believe to be) the best support possible for students.
Catherine Cronin (2017) articulates:
The pastoral nature of my role, and the helpful disposition of the employees it attracts, means we try our upmost to best help the student. Inevitably, this can require manipulating areas of the process. Unfortunately, this can result in inconsistencies across the university and can sometimes feel that only students with the most extreme circumstances can fully benefit from the process, as it depends on the ‘individual agency’ of the colleague handling the application.
In the conclusion of my previous post, I wrote ‘there are still barriers in flexibility that hinder the openness required to create an equal environment for students’. My LAC report accidentally found itself centred on this theme, and the students’ experience of flexibility with submission deadlines.
For me, since working on both pieces, the terms openness and flexibility have almost become interchangeable, both equalling each other and unable to exist without each other.
Higher Education (HE) has historically been strict with assessment styles and deadlines, and has created a stubborn expectation of the good student. However, HE is evolving and as a larger range of people can now access HE, flexibility is becoming more familiar. I believe the Covid-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for this change in attitude toward inflexible deadlines in particular. During the pandemic, my team witnessed a huge increase in students utilising the MC process, as expected with the worldwide circumstances out of our control. Nevertheless, the applications have been increasing by the hundreds year upon year, with no real sign of plateaux. It is trusted that Covid MC application numbers were the reason for the initial increase, but nonetheless — circumstances unrelated to the pandemic also continue to increase rapidly.
The pandemic forced us to pause life as we knew it, and gave us the opportunity to reflect and adjust our habits. A simple search of ‘lockdown reflections’ on medium alone, pulls many thoughts together — but they all tend to agree on the notion that the constant need to just get by and ‘cope’ is a pattern they wish to avoid in the post -lockdown world.
This coincides with the Mental Health Movement that has picked up pace in recent years. People are encouraged to not feel shame when they are struggling, share their circumstances and reach out for help. This is part of the ethos of Student Support, and is what the MC process aims to assist by offering flexibility to a student when they are in need.
There is mirroring of these societal changes in HE culture. Professor Berube of Pennsylvania University admits to changing his opinion on deadlines for students — stating ‘I used to tell my students that juggling deadlines was good preparation for life after college’. Berube acknowledges the benefit of deadlines for some students but has overall shifted his perception on the topic. He addresses other professors, reassuring them that he has had similar worries that ‘flexi[ble] deadlines and in-person attendance will erode the intellectual standards of [our] courses’ and though he still believes that ‘juggling deadlines is a valuable skill…[he does not] think its universally valuable or universally transferable’. I personally could not agree more.
During a study that explored implementing flexible deadlines to improve student learning experiences, Hills and Peacock (2022) found that ‘students unanimously agreed that the proactive extension policy was valuable to their learning’. Contrary to concerns that extensions encourage procrastination, the report found that ‘proactive extensions enabled [students] to improve the quality of their work and to better manage their academic workloads, reducing stress…and act as self-regulated learners’.
I agree that the autonomy flexible deadlines, without requiring a MC note, provides for students is valuable. At the end of every academic year, many students emerge having missed deadlines, and consequently received penalised marks. A lot of the time due to feeling daunted and unable to face the MC process at the time of submission. The flexible deadline without MC could alleviate this stress on students, allowing them to focus their time on seeking proactive support instead.
I find myself frustrated at times that the MC process is reactive in nature, and the administrative workload it requires disables us to intervene sooner to support the student before mitigation is needed. We are often unable to provide the personalised experience and support we would like to, due to the administrative tasks consuming our time.
We receive a high amount of MC applications relating to IT issues. These can be difficult to accept via MC as students often are unable to provide sufficient evidence to support their application. A lot of these applications are appealing a grade penalty for being a matter of minutes late due to slow WIFI, loss of connection etc. However, if the student cannot provide evidence of this it cannot be accepted via MC. This somewhat unfairly relies on the agency of the programme administrator or marker of the submission to waive this penalty, which creates inconsistencies. With how reliant we have become on technology for submissions, it seems we are lacking in adequate policy to compliment this.
My LAC report showed that we received almost 200 MC applications this year relating to technical issues. If students who need a few extra minutes or days on a deadline, due to a random, non-serious circumstance, could use their own autonomy and flexible deadline for this instead of having to apply for MC; it could potentially free up a lot of time for my team to support students in need of extra support.
Having the time to intervene sooner with students may prevent the ‘damage control’ approach that is necessary in some cases. As we are also limited to the MC outcomes we can provide; these outcomes may not benefit the students case as much as interventional or continued support could have at the time.
As we positively broaden the grounds for mitigation, it is apparent that some circumstances simply do not fit the mould of the process. Sometimes, providing extensions does not alleviate stress on the student or improve neither their academic or personal situation.
There are boundaries to the mitigation we can apply for grades, we can provide extensions and first attempts for coursework deadlines, but we are unable to offer anything other than a first attempt for examinations. This means the student can re-sit the exam without a grade cap. This can prove stressful for some students as the resit period looms over them whilst they continue the semester.
We can omit elements worth below 30% weighting in a unit, and apply an average of their grades to this component. But there is a limit to how many units this can be applied to.
Although I understand the requirement for these boundaries- without them would prove a logistical nightmare- if we were able to provide a larger range of MC outcomes, this could more practically ease a student’s struggle. It could also allow administrators the space to practice their own agency and apply mitigation to best enhance the students’ experience.
Flexible deadlines, a broader scope for mitigation and general grace within MC is beneficial to all the students we support. But as HE is consistently encouraged to ‘close the gap’ and ‘recruit, enrol, and support more students from low- and moderate-income backgrounds’, I think these factors are paramount more now than ever.
Juliette interestingly discusses the need for transparency to create an open admissions process for Dentistry. She informs that students from less privileged/ non-traditional backgrounds are unable to make up the additional credits and extra-curricular components in the competitive application process, due in part to being unaware of what is expected/ looked for by institutions. However, I agree with Juliette that transparency alone does not necessarily ‘level the playing field’ and more flexibility and grace is required. Such flexibility and openness can be seen in the university’s widening participation (WP) efforts.
I believe that the increase in MC applications we experience can be, in part, related to the university’s WP programme and subsequent larger intake of students from lower-economic backgrounds. In general, students within this pool have less privilege and more responsibilities that call for more flexibility in deadlines.
An obvious example of this is the financial privilege the average student has over WP students. We often receive MC applications from students requesting an extension as they have had to pick up more hours at their workplace to afford living expenses. This is a difficult circumstance to apply mitigation to, as school policy recommends students work no more than fifteen hours per week alongside their studies during term time. Although there is funding support and packages available for students, I believe that more leniency could be present in the MC process and toward deadlines in general. This may, in turn, contribute to openness in the HE landscape — if students are aware there is more flexibility and support available regarding finances, they may be more likely to apply to university. Flexibility breaks down barriers and reduces the effects of privilege.
Some possible recommendations…
I recognise that the term ‘flexible deadlines’ can seem ambiguous, and measurable boundaries may need to be present here. Therefore, I believe it would be beneficial to introduce a self-certification process for students to obtain a one-week extension, as a first step toward flexible deadlines. There is a misconception that students take advantage of flexibility and the mitigation process, however from my experience, and findings from the Hill and Peacock study in 2022, this is not the case and most students who reach out for support are genuine cases. I think that introducing self-certification will furthermore cut down MC applications for my team to administrate and relinquish time to better support the students throughout their studies. I think that flexible deadlines would help address inequalities amongst students, and further contribute to the idea of openness in HE.
When discussing the range of MC outcomes we are able to apply for students, this feels like a more complicated concept to explore. However, I believe we can make a more ‘open’ adjustment to the outcomes we already have available. For example, unit weightings within my school are commonly 60:40, making it impossible to omit any elements from the unit. A simple 10% change to the weighting, creating a 70:30 ratio, would allow us to omit an element that could really make a difference to a student with MC.
To conclude…
I mention earlier that the terms openness and flexibility have almost become interchangeable for me. I believe that the large, arching goal of openness in HE can only be achieved if individuals are given the agency to practice and apply their own ideas of openness in their own roles. For this to be achieved — I think more flexibility in policy and procedures within professional services needs to be present.
It is easy to view the rigid structures in HE and feel defeated in the quest to be more ‘open’, but just like bamboo, I believe it can be way more flexible than it looks — HE definitely has more bend in it yet.
