Do you know how the cuts will affect you?

Please let me know if you have any news on the courses / modules that might be in danger due to the proposed cuts – it would really help the Union form an overview of what’s going on.

Please email me

John

Could Your Course Be Affected by Proposed Cuts?

It’s not a snappy headline, I am genuinely asking. The proposals have been released that explain where the Uni would like to make job cuts because of the debt they have and I have been told that it will only effect a small number of courses that already have very low student numbers. The Union would like to plan how best to support students where their courses are under threat, but as these proposals are only circulating with departments, there is no way for me to get an overview. If any students or staff are reading this and have some news, please email me- it would be really useful to see what these courses are before the exam panic descends.

Poor Performance?

I just wanted to give a bit more publicity to some dry changes in the academic regulations that are quite useful to students. I spent hours in this meeting so I want someone to know I went!

A very very short summary:

• Where you repeat a piece of Course Work or resit an exam, even if you get 100% of the marks in that sitting - your mark will be 40% because it’s a resit.
• Resit coursework won’t be a new assignment – you’ll get the piece you failed back to improve on. Resit exams will still be new.
• You now have 10 extra days past a deadline to get coursework in but you’ll lose marks. Now, it will be marked up to ten working days late, but again the mark will be capped at 40% because it’s late. You can do with without mitigating circumstances, but if you do have them, you can still use that form and apply for the full marks.
• If something happened to limit your performance in an exam / coursework, but you did it anyway, you can appeal your mark AFTER THE RESULTS ARE PUBLISHED, and be allowed to take the assessment again as a first sit with no capped mark. You’ll need evidence though..
  
• Post-Grad students have LOST the right to request a deferral of their dissertation. They now have to qualify for and use the mitigating circumstances path.
• The way the undergraduate degree classifications are calculated has changed. Your mark will be weighted to give 2/3’s the average of your six best Honours level modules (third year for most of us) and 1/3 of the average of the next best 9 modules from Honours or Intermediate level (the rest of third year most of second year). Basically, if you averaged a high 2:1 in third year, and a high 2:2 in second year, its mostly likely you’ll come out with a 2:1 overall. First year (certificate) modules don’t count towards this.

This is very simple summary, the details of this are a bit more complicated and you need to read though http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/academic-regulations/ really thoroughly and apply it to your own situation to get a definite answer – please don’t print this and start waving it at your lecturers. I just wanted to highlight that things are different and you should go and find out if you are better or worse off as a result. I hope it’s the first!

First Post

The Comms team have told me that I have to write something for this, and the Comms team are a bit scary and I need to keep them on-side as I need lots of posters made in February, so here I am, writing something.

On the one hand I can’t really believe anyone out there would really be that interested in what I have to say, but on the other hand I think that as a Union it’s important to be visible and accountable so this might be a nice, modern way of achieving that.

I’m also told that the great thing about blogging is that is that it is interactive – so there’s a good opportunity to delegate… What would you like me and future Welfare & Diversity Officers to use this space for? Your ideas are needed as I don’t really have any about what to do with it!

Of course, the real reason I’m here is that it’s exam time and I’m procrastinating like crazy, but admitting that makes me feel guilty, so I’m off to revise some more Tort Law… any tips on that would also be very welcome!

Oh, if anyone else is looking for some procrastination food, this cheered me up yesterday.

Thanks for reading,

John