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The Editor, The University Observer, Student Centre, Belfield, Dublin 4.
All letters are subject to editorial approval. The Editor reserves the right to edit any letters.

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Resit and Repeat Fees

Madam,

I noticed with great interest the promises of the two candidates in the Students’ Union Education Vice-President election earlier this month, particularly in regard to their intention to seek a reduction in the fees charged to students for repeating exams they have failed in one way or another.

While one might argue that it’s only fair for students resitting an exam (i.e. those who didn’t, through no fault of their own, get a fair chance to pass a particular subject first time around) to be charged less for the right to retake an exam, I suspect the student body needs to take a long hard look at itself if it expects to be offered a discount on a repeat exam.

By definition, students sitting a repeat exam have already been missed their first chance to pass a given module – if they’ve been unlucky due to an illness or bereavement, they should have secured an extenuating circumstances form to merit a resit exam as opposed to a repeat. I’m not saying that no student deserves a second chance to pass an exam – everyone makes mistakes. But there exists now a sweeping culture in UCD where it would almost appear every effort is being made to facilitate students who, for one reason or another, don’t do the work expected of them to pass a module.

As a postgraduate student and part-time tutor in UCD, I myself have been through both sides of the academic process and can understand the demands on your average undergrad. Sometimes given the burdens placed on a student by multiple consecutive modules, it’s simply too much to expect a student to get through each with flying colours.

In some ways, however, having been on both sides of the sense, I would argue that the student movement has done too well for itself. The multitude of financial and academic crutches offered to students now, combined with UCD’s top-down policy of trying to minimise dropout and failure rates as much as possible, mean that it’s now virtually impossible to actually fail a degree. Perhaps your readers should think: when was the last time they heard of a student leaving college not because they’d dropped out for whatever reason, but because they were deemed simply not good enough by the college to earn a degree? Students either quit college of their own volition or spend a few more semesters earning their undergraduate degrees than originally planned. Rarely does UCD concede the honest truth that some of its students are not good enough.

We are taught that all things in the world are relative – that there is no light without dark, no good without evil, and so on. But this leads to a serious point: amid all the talk of grade inflation, the significant underlying concern emerges that if too few – if, indeed, any – students are being given F grades and simply being told they lack the intellect needed to earn (key word, EARN) a degree. What good is a group of students with First Class Honours – with their grades inflated or otherwise – if almost every student who attends the University earns a degree? Without the failure there is no glory – and without failing students, the measure of a degree is made useless.

Sadly I must conclude that the University has become so greedy for cash that it tries to extort every possible grant off the HEA and every possible fee out of the student, while the student body seems to expect a degree to be awarded without having to go out of its way to earn it.

Yours etc,

Name and address with Editor