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11:21am on Friday, 16th October, 2020:
Outburst
It used to be that we didn't allow final-year students to do resits. If they failed, they failed.
That all stopped when students started paying for their education. It turned out they actually considered themselves to be paying for a degree, rather than an education. That meant we had to allow final-year resits.
COVID-19 has added a new twist to this. Last year, students who failed their exams and failed their resits had to repeat the year. This time, they get to resit their resits. Yesterday, I was informed that some students did indeed fail their resits and I now have to write another exam (which, given that they could cut-and-paste their way to passing the previous one, I confidently expect them also to fail).
Writing exams takes time — much more time than actually sitting them. It involves thinking of questions that haven't been asked before and can't be asked again. I'm not best pleased that I'm required to do this for the benefit of what could well be just one student (they haven't given us numbers yet). I'm particularly displeased that this is yet another out-of-the-blue, do-it-within-a-fortnight piece of work dropped on me when I'm on a tight schedule. I have to rewrite all my lectures so there's double the material in them (replacing the classes I can no longer have) and then pre-record them so that the students can watch them at their leisure (that is, binge on them like a box set in the days before the exam).
I guess this means we can add the word "reresit" to the dictionary.
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Copyright © 2020 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).