It has been heart-warming to see everyone working together to ensure continuity to your studies while we respond to the Coronavirus situation.
I know that many of you have been worried, and my colleagues are working hard to ensure that you complete the year and are not adversely affected.
Please be assured that we will be supportive and pragmatic in our approach to support you through your remaining assessments and examinations.
Live assessment
If you have any assessments that are due to take place on campus, we are finding alternative ways to complete them off site, or defer them but only where professional bodies require they take place. Your SchoolDepartment will keep you updated on those changes directly via Moodle.
Assessments due to be submitted via Moodle
We are hoping and expecting that you will be able to complete your assessments on Moodle on time and in the usual way. If you are worried about this at all, please discuss this with your Module Leader in the first instance.
In exceptional circumstances, such as if an assessment requires specialist software, we have agreed some extensions. We are hoping to limit this so that you can finish your year on time and also to prevent any assessment 'bunching', where you may have to submit more than one assessment at a similar time.
Exams
We are currently identifying alternative ways for the completion of exams. In most cases, we are expecting to provide you with a take-home exam where you will be given five working days to complete the paper. Where there are specific requirements from professional bodies or exams that are technical in nature, such as a mathematical solution, we may be asking you to complete these exams online.
We will also be providing you with one extra hour to enable you to take breaks from your use of IT and to deal with possible technical/IT continuity issues.
In addition, there will be a late submission window of two hours to reduce any last minute worry while you are doing this in unfamiliar surroundings or downloading remotely.
More information on how this will work to follow
We will be explaining how this will work in more detail during the week commencing the Monday 30March, when we publish the exam timetable. This will mean, no matter where you are geographically, you will be able to complete your exams.
In addition to all of these changes, we will be considering your grades very carefully to ensure that you are not disadvantaged by this disruption.
This includes analysing and benchmarking your grades against those of previous students. If there are significant differences, we will make appropriate adjustments to your marks/grades and adopt a consistent approach so that students across all courses are treated in the same way.
We also wanted to remind you that if you are unwell you can apply for extenuating circumstances in the usual way; you will find all the information about how to do this here.
If you already have a support in place from the Wellbeing Team we will make sure that we have alternative arrangements in place for you if you need them.
Please continue to keep in touch with us and to ask us for help and support as we work through the current challenges. We are here to help.
Jane Harrington
Vice-Chancellor
