The Student Union’s Fair Outcomes for Students campaign has released two new goals for the future. It aims to open more study spaces and to ensure that “students have the tools and resources available to them to fill out Mitigating Circumstances Notices to Examiners (MCEs) and Explanatory Statements.”
The campaign, which launched in January 2021, demands more study spaces to provide “quiet spaces open for their continuing study over the busy exam and assessment period in Trinity term.” It “also [wants] to support students who may feel like their room is not the best place for their exam, and thus would like to find alternative venues in which they can sit their exams.”
Fair Outcomes for Students aims to ensure students are provided with resources to fill out MCEs and Explanatory Statements. The campaign encourages “all students to keep disruption logs where they feel like the ongoing pandemic has affected their studies and to make a note of the universities recommendations on what to include in disruption logs, MCEs, and explanatory statements.”
The campaign has already achieved “improvements to [the] Mitigating Circumstances process”. Oxford University agreed to remove “the need to provide independent medical evidence” and “the need for students to seek and gain college approval for submitting Mitigating Circumstances notices to Examiners.”
It has also successfully campaigned for the University to “allow for the submission of explanatory statements which highlight any barrier [students have] faced in completing their work. These will be provided to examiners during the marking phase, which means they will have an impact directly on student marks, not just classifications.”
The campaign also has seen the University adjust paper averages. Fair Outcomes for Students believe this “guarantees that paper averages for medium and large cohorts which are below a small average range will be brought in line to the pre-pandemic average.”
Image credit: Tejvan Pettinger / CC BY 2.0
