In light of the January exam period and the current lockdown, the University made additional changes in order to support students both academically and financially.
In an email to students at the start of January, Vice Chancellor Koen Lamberts assured students: “We are committed to working with our Students’ Union to ensure we are supporting you in the best possible way and are continuing to enhance our support provision as circumstances change.
“Before the winter break we announced that all students living in our University owned or managed accommodation would not be charged rent for a two-week period due to the government’s student travel window. We also established a £3 million Covid-19 Support Fund to support students, in addition to the other support services already available.”
Through lobbying by the Forgotten Students’ Campaign, the University has committed to mitigate the impact of the pandemic by implementing academic protections.
The Forgotten students’ campaign pushed for adaptations to degree programmes and types of assessments to account for the context of online learning, and to ensure that assessments can be managed more easily in the current circumstances.
Departments have also been asked by the University to take a more flexible approach to requests for deadline extensions. Exam Boards will ensure that results are fair and considered in the context of students’ previous performances, previous cohorts performance, and the circumstances in which assessments took place.
Students will not be required to submit an Extenuating Circumstances Form (ECF) to cover issues such as general levels of anxiety in relation to the pandemic, adjustment to learning via blended learning, short-term infrequent IT issues or having to self-isolate for 14 days, as these are disruptions that everyone is experiencing will automatically be taken into account.
The University has extended their agreement not to charge rent for University own or managed accommodation from 8 January to 8 February in light of the current lockdown and government restrictions on face to face teaching.
The Forgotten Students’ campaign is now pushing for students living in private accommodation to receive better support, education officer Ellie Lynas said to Forge Press:
“We are really pleased with everything we have won for students so far, but it isn’t over yet! Our team is currently working on private rent rebates, tuition fees, getting clarity for semester two plans, digital poverty and the graduate job market.
We hope that the mitigations we got the university to commit to before Christmas brought reassurance to students, but I want to stress that we will be reviewing the effectiveness of these academic protections once the winter exam results are back.
If the results indicate that certain demographics have been disproportionately impacted by the current circumstances, I will be fighting for improved mitigations. No student should be disadvantaged by their learning environment.”
A petition circulating on change.com with almost 500 signatures is calling for the University to consider re-weighting second and third year marks. The petition states: “reweighting this year’s marks for second year and final year students is an effective way to ensure this exceptional year does not affect students final classifications detrimentally.
“This could be achieved by allowing the final year weighting to be equal to second year or greater as normal depending on which achieves a better result for the student.”
Ellie Lynas added: “I have received lots of feedback and ideas from students about what additional academic protections could look like, and I am passing all of these on to the university. These suggestions will be incorporated into any future discussions around mitigations.”
Image: Sheffield Students’ Union
