When you put in more effort than you’ve ever done and are still unsure of your grade, you experience a certain type of anxiety. That anxiety is real for hundreds of University of Nottingham students. It’s where they’ve been living since staff began a marking boycott earlier this year, refusing to grade student work in protest against plans that placed nearly 2,700 employees at risk of redundancy.
The boycott, organized through the University and College Union, is industrial action in its quietest but most disruptive form. There are no picket lines outside of lecture halls. There were no rallies that could be heard over the evening news. Just silence, where feedback and final grades should be. And for students on the edge of graduating — or progressing into their next year — that silence carries real consequences.
The human cost of this is evident in Abigail Maguire’s circumstances. She enrolled at Nottingham to study liberal arts while still carrying grief from her brother’s death. The loss didn’t stay in the background. It surfaced in her physical health, in her concentration, in grades during second year that didn’t come close to reflecting what she was capable of. She appealed to the university. The response, as she describes it, was not exactly compassionate. “Just do better in your third year,” she was told. So she did. She received first-class grades on average. Additionally, the university’s contingency system may use those earlier, grief-shadowed grades to estimate her final result because staff are no longer marking. Three years of labor, the most difficult of which came last, may have been reduced to a figure that conveys a different message.
Even though it doesn’t solve anything, it is possible to comprehend both sides of this issue. There are few options for protest for university employees who are facing widespread layoffs. One of the more successful ones is a marking boycott. It interferes with operations and is difficult to ignore. The question of whether that makes it the right decision varies greatly depending on whether you’re waiting for a degree certificate or sitting in a union meeting.
In order to allow students to graduate or advance even in the absence of fully marked work, the university has implemented what it refers to as contingency regulations. These include a mix of derived marks from a student’s prior academic record, part-for-whole computations, and actual marks when available. The university has made it clear that students are not required to accept derived grades if they feel disadvantaged by them, and that actual marks are the preferred option whenever possible. Until you read the fine print, that final point may seem comforting.
Waiting is the result of rejecting the derived marks. Perhaps waiting until August. or October. or December. This uncertainty is not only inconvenient for students who have conditional job offers, postgraduate placements, or visa requirements linked to progression dates, but it can also cause plans that took months to develop to fall apart. Maguire put it this way: pupils are “held to ransom.” That statement carried some weight.
Not enough attention is paid to the larger tension that permeates all of this. Universities frequently require students to perform well under duress, persevere through challenging personal situations, file formal appeals, and have faith that the system will be impartial. What happens to that trust when the organization is in the middle of a dispute and the individuals who are supposed to assess your work are refusing to do so for their own justifiable reasons?
How long the boycott will last and how many students it will ultimately affect are still unknown. The majority won’t experience any disruption, according to the university. The repercussions for those who do range from annoying to actually changing their lives. Maguire has made the decision to hold off. She demands that her final grade accurately represent her final year. “I don’t want that to go to waste,” she declared. It’s an easy thing to desire. It’s the kind of thing a university should be able to guarantee.
