This year’s graduations, universities claim, will be indistinguishable from those of previous years. Except there’s one glaring problem: as a student there isn’t much to celebrate. Currently, a marking and assessment boycott is affecting 145 British universities and, like many of the thousands of students graduating this summer, I am set to leave without a formal classification.
For the class of 2023, the same year-group whose GCSEs were reformed in 2018 and A-levels cancelled in 2020, this marks the end of a deeply dispiriting educational journey.
This situation is the intended, “acceptable” and entirely predictable consequence of the impasse in dialogue between the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) and the University and College Union (UCU) over adequate pay and working conditions.
Across the country, various final-year exams for students have been cancelled. Some at Queen’s University Belfast will not graduate this summer as work remains unmarked. Further strikes by staff are set to take place on university open days at Bristol, Durham and Westminster. Staff at Leeds University have voted to strike indefinitely after management chose to punitively deduct 100% of striking members’ pay, despite marking often being a small component of their work.
In response to the boycott, universities including UCL, Durham and Edinburgh have largely confirmed plans to award students with degrees when a quota of marks has been received. Under the proposed system, should a student receiving an interim degree of a 2-1 receive a 2-2 in actuality, the 2-1 will hold. At Keele University, degrees are set to be awarded even if modules are being partly marked.
I feel that in compromising academic standards over listening to academic staff, these measures dilute the value of a degree in an increasingly competitive job market. Universities promise that eventually all work will be marked. However, a re-ballot is set to take place over the summer, and if it passes the marking and assessment boycott will be extended until negotiations occur and a resolution is reached.
International students requiring a degree to renew their visas have been left in limbo. Degrees requiring accreditation – such as physics and chemistry – are in jeopardy and, according to professional bodies, they may not even be valid if some of the work has not been marked.
Instead of placing pressure on the UCEA to resume negotiations to prevent these outcomes, universities are remarkably committed to pursuing every other strategy in existence. Cambridge is launching an “emergency exam taskforce”. At one Durham faculty, according to Durham UCU, those unfamiliar with material are marking students’ work – and, in some cases, as one union member claims, overwriting existing marks made by the module leader prior to the boycott, although the university strongly denies this is happening. At another institution, a vice-chancellor has reportedly taken it upon herself to mark history of art assignments.
This unfolding crisis is the inevitable result of a sector riven with exploitation and poor working conditions. Since 2009, academic staff have faced a real-terms pay cut of 20%. University management remain wedded to a strategy of enriching one class of university staff – with nearly half of the country’s vice-chancellors earning more than £300,000 – at the expense of others.
I feel that the UK is on the brink of a nationwide degree scandal with varying engagement from university management, who have abandoned academic standards, and no intervention from the government in sight. It is this year’s cohort who will inevitably be paying the price.
Kimi Chaddah is a student at Durham University and a writer on education and politics
This article was amended on 13 June 2023. An earlier headline said that the writer would be left “without a degree”; this is not the case for students at Durham University. An earlier subheading implied that negotiations had halted at Durham University, while they are ongoing. Engagement in negotiations varies (an earlier version said there was “no negotiation from university management”) and all marks do not have to be received before a final degree can be awarded. A comment from Durham University denying that inexperienced people are marking exam papers has been added.
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