Your comment: A number of students feel that our exams this year are unfair and unacceptable. Although the pandemic has changed everything about university, wellbeing and life, the only thing that has changed about our exams is that they have been moved online. Modern Languages students often live together and therefore have the same exams. The wifi of a university student is often not strong enough to support this. I have five of us in my house and even when we are just scrolling through Facebook, the wifi plays up, so how are we expected to complete exams? Also, one of my lecturers said that marking will take longer this year, as things take longer to do online. However, this is surely not what they think when it comes to our work, as we have exactly the same material to do and time to do it in as previous student had. It is just extremely unfair that alternative solutions have been found for many of my friends on different courses, such as essays being open for a week, or even a day, but when it comes to languages, we are just given this unfair treatment. I believed that this kind of exam would only happen when absolutely necessary, and this is definitely not necessary for modern languages students, as there are many other ways to test us.
Our response:
Many thanks for your comments. I believe there is a possible misunderstanding. In Modern Languages it has been decided to use online testing for examinations for a number of reasons. First, we need to conform to the learning outcomes of each module due to university regulations and many of those outcomes require a certain level of language ability. Second, we need to uphold the strict regulations of the governing bodies who regulate academic standards in order to ensure that students are given the degree qualification they merit. In our case these academic standards are regulated by the QAA and we need to follow their subject benchmarks. These regulations require that students are properly tested for their language ability and this is not always possible in the subject of languages without timed assessments, whereas in other subjects such timed assessments may not be necessary to fulfil these regulations.
But it is not true that the only difference is that the exams are online as these exams can be done within a 24 hour period and have been moderated to take into consideration the circumstances of the pandemic, and have been adapted to suit the restricted learning opportunities of this past year. All our examinations have been seen by external examiners from other institutions who have confirmed their efficacy and fairness.
Although the examinations are timed once started, all our exams should be available to complete during a 24 hour period and students should have plenty of notice of the date of the exam. If Wi-Fi issues are likely to cause concern then there is the possibility of booking study spaces in the library in order to carry out such assessments with a reliable internet connection. Please see: Aberystwyth University - Information Services : Study spaces.
As far as marking is concerned it is true that this takes somewhat longer to do online, as a few clicks of a mouse for each correction over the course of a single piece of work takes longer than a quick stroke of a pen. Multiply this by many pieces of work for each staff member and the workload does increase. However, all staff are aware of the 15 working day timeline for the return of assessed work and should still be adhering to that.
