Over the past year, King’s College London (KCL) students have found the university’s mitigating circumstances (MC) system to have some serious shortcomings. To understand the extent of the problems with MC requests and the repercussions they had, Roar talked to a series of students.
For many King’s students, the days, weeks and months leading up to Period 2 exams constitute the most stressful part of the academic year.
With coursework deadlines fast approaching and two terms worth of content demanding revision, it appears that the pressure is on for everyone.
However, recent shortcomings of KCL’s MC system, intended to help students request necessary extensions for coursework or online exam deadlines, reveal that students with extra obstacles in their personal lives have been facing exceptionally tough times.
Late replies
One recurring issue Roar found students faced was their MC request outcomes turning up after the deadline of the coursework or exam in question had passed. One English and Spanish student told us how despite applying for MC for multiple pieces of her January coursework, she had to complete all of them by the original deadline due to a lack of timely response from both the Department of English and the Modern Languages Department.
While she noted the Modern Languages Department handled her case better, ultimately offering her the opportunity to polish and re-submit her Spanish coursework by a new deadline, she felt this was pointless given she had already felt compelled to complete it earlier.
Frustration with the pace of deferring an assignment was also expressed by a medicine student who, after contracting Covid-19 in May, received an email from a KCL student support officer that encouraged him to submit an MC request. Whether approved or not, he would be permitted to sit his assessment in August. However, it went on to state that if the request was not approved, his assessment mark would be capped at 40%.
On top of that, he would have to wait a month before hearing back on his request. Since the Period 2 exam he attempted to defer was in June, he felt like he was “pushed into a corner” needing to “cram as much as possible” after being ill in case the request was denied.
A lack of empathy
Another problem this student’s story brought to light was the lack of empathy with which MC requests are processed. He explained to us that when he contracted Covid-19, he was only just getting back on his feet after a “very poor year.” Besides issues in his flat and settling into London as a whole, a major party he blamed for his bad year was King’s itself.
He explained that after getting the British Medical Association (BMA) involved to bring a long process of trying to change his personal tutor to an end, he was forced to attend a disciplinary meeting for professionalism in April. It was then, he stated, after he directly spoke to representatives, that the college accepted his claims as valid. Despite receiving an apology letter, he said “it feels like unless anyone has a real go at them, they don’t want to change their stance”.
He additionally added that it doesn’t have to be this way:
“Whilst I did my masters at the University of Sheffield, my mother got seriously ill a week before my exams. Ended up on a [ventilator]. The receptionist saw me upset and rang the head of the year until she got a response and immediately both said not to worry about doing the exam and to do what I felt was right for me and my family and they would sort out mitigating on my behalf. No fuss, no hassle, no nothing, no one month wait. And everyone was on the same page and actioned it there and then that day. I also know other people from Sheff Uni by old friends who have suffered with mental health issues during Covid-19 and the university have allowed them to defer up to two years in some cases.”
“I honestly couldn’t say King’s would do the same. At the moment, unless they do something, they could end up with a similar case like the one seen at Bristol University.” In saying this, he referenced the suicide of Physics student Natasha Abrahart, who suffered from an anxiety disorder exacerbated by her university’s rigid exam policy.
Another student told Roar how, in order get an extension for an assignment following her grandfather’s passing, she had to prove he had passed away by getting a note from the funeral agency. In her words, this was predictably “upsetting to have to deal with at that time”.
A lack of follow-through
Another frustration a student expressed to us over MC was that once she got her assignments extended, she felt forgotten about. In particular, on the day of her new exam deadline, she had to email her department four times to open her assignment’s submission window. After anxiously awaiting a response, she submitted the exam with only a few minutes to spare.
Her department additionally told students requesting MCs in January that if they needed more evidence for their request to be processed, they would be notified. However, her requests and those of some peers were ultimately rejected for a lack of evidence without the warning they had been promised. As a result, tutors had to back up their students, extending and adding stress to the process.
New rules and regulations
The start of our new academic year has done nothing to indicate submitting MC requests will get easier. For instance, the History department stated in its Year 2 and Year 3 induction session that students are no longer able to submit requests for having Covid-19. The Senior Lecturer in the History of European Political Thought went on to encourage students that if you are “a little bit ill” (“unless you are passing out”) you should be working. The same goes for if you are “a little bit stressed”. He also stated that several deadlines occurring all at once or computer problems are not valid reasons to submit MC requests. These changes came as a shock to one student, who remembered deadline proximity and computer glitches being named as grounds for extensions during their introduction to MC in first year.
KCL’s response
When asked by Roar about these students’ experiences with MC, the College said, “Students can either submit a mitigating circumstances request before or shortly after an assessment deadline and, where possible, we strongly encourage students to make an application as soon as they can to ensure a timely process. We monitor the time for decisions to be made and are working with students to help identify any enhancements in the application process to ensure that anticipated times for a response are met.”
Evidently, in the eyes of too many King’s students, MC, a resource designed to promote fairness in academia is intrinsically unfair. The stories shared with us at Roar have painted the picture of ineffective and even callous decision-making when it comes to processing MC requests. Sadly, the faults in the MC system ultimately make students feel like the university does not have their best interest at heart.
UPDATE: The Print version of this article, published in the September 2022 Print edition, stated that KCL had not responded to our request for comment at the time of publication. Since then, they responded with the aforementioned statement.
