Anger and Angst

My sympathy goes out to a group of students today who through no fault of their own have done a significant amount of work for what appears on the surface to be little reward. To cut a long story short, there were problems with one of the Universitys computer systems recently, and a knock on effect of this means that the assignment these students submitted has now been changed from a summative assessment to a formative one. Additionally it seems likely that some of the assessments yet to come will be re-weighted to account for the weighting lost due to the change of status from summative to formative. A fair result for those who couldn’t submit the assignment, less of a happy conclusion for some of those who did manage to get their assignment in.

Some words to these students before I go any further - No matter what the final outcome of this you haven’t lost as much as it seems you might have at the moment. You have studied the material and learned form it, you have the assignment and answers so you can study further if you need to, make use of these as you would have done had the whole thing worked as expected. Regarding the change of weighting for the rest of the assessments – They will spread 5.5% over another 4 assessments. Nothing will change in the questions you will get, nothing will change in the marking criteria, and whatever you would have scored in that assignment at the old weighting is what you will score under the new. You got a good score for this assessment and you aren’t sure you will do as well over the next 4? – Well the truth is you won’t if you let this episode impact on your learning, put your anger and emotion into a complaint to the university and then move on with your studies. You don’t have very good health and you’re concerned that you may not be as well for the next assessments as you were for this one? – letting this matter impact on you won’t help your health, if your health suffers your learning will suffer, put your anger and emotion into a complaint to the university and then move on with your studies, if you feel by the end of the course that your performance has been affected by this then fill in a PT39 and say so. And I can hear you there muttering because you don’t want the calm voice of reason, you want action, apologies, heads to role, your score back, any or all of the aforementioned – yes I know, and I can imagine were I in your situation I would feel the same. We give a lot of ourselves to our studies and for many of us it isn’t just brain power, knowledge and time that goes into any assignment it’s nerves and tension, angst and anxiety – to go through all that and then find you can’t submit, or your submission won’t count towards your final score must be a real blow for some, quite devastating for a few, rage inducing I imagine for others, I should think between you, you cover a vast range of negative emotions. I’m not trying to give you platitudes, or giving you a lecture about how you should get over it, I’m telling you as a fairly experienced student that if you don’t manage this it will spoil the course for you and may even affect it significantly – get all that negativity into a letter of complaint and then go back to your course, let the mechanisms of the university take over to resolve the situation, and just as importantly to prevent it happening again.

Complain

I love this university; I wouldn’t study any other way or with anyone else. I’ve been an O U student on and off since 1991/2 and in all that time they have never once let me down or given me cause for complaint. I’ve met other students who have had problems, but for me any problems have been either of my own making or the ‘life happens’ stuff.

My current position within the Students Association has given me in insight into more of the problems students face than I had before, and it has given me a certain insight into the systems and procedures in place within the University.

I firmly believe that the relevant departments are doing everything they can to provide an equitable solution for the students I’ve talked about in the section above. I don’t doubt that they will look to put systems and procedures in place to prevent such a thing happening again. I’m positive they are sorry this happened.

I’m less sure of a couple of things.

I’m not sure the University always appreciate how many people are upset/annoyed/de-motivated when problems occur. I know that they have figures about numbers on courses, so in the course I was talking about they know how many students were affected - but that doesn’t tell them how those students were affected as individuals. They rarely get to know stuff like that because we don’t tell them - we sound off in our course forums, we have a moan to fellow students at the next tutorial, we might say something to our tutor, some might even come to the Students Association to voice their anger, frustration, concerns – but we don’t often make an official complaint to record our dissatisfaction and advise them of the impact the event has had on us. If we have a valid reason to then we should complain, we should say how we feel, we should make them aware of the full impact the situation as had on us as a student.

I’m not sure the University appreciate the value of its complaints department. An organisation can learn more about itself from its complaints department that it can from any number of customer satisfaction questionnaires. Satisfaction questionnaires and unhappy events rarely coincide, so even if dissatisfaction is recorded on them it is often softened by the distance of time. Complaints generally occur fairly close in time to the event, they record not only the event itself and what the complainant thinks, they often include either a direct explanation of how the event made the complainant feel, or give a sense of that from the tone, language, etc. A sensible organisation not only analyses the hard data of the complaints it takes on board the softer more qualitative data. A clever organisation makes improvements to itself and retains its customers based on data which includes that available from its complaints department. A really smart organisation actively promotes its complaints department and encourages its customers to use it should they feel a need.