Because that would be logical, and logic has died.
Indeed it has. I recently got back marks for a university assessment (that I pay 10k pounds a year for) and the marks were literally made up. I must talk crazy, right? But no. I have proof.
Part of the assessment was producing a five minute video that demoed a system I developed. That was super hard because the instructions told us to have five sections: An introduction with some explanations, demo of features, how we evaluated the system, and next steps in development to make it even better. If you divide 5 minutes by 4, you get 1.25 minutes per section, so 1.25 minutes of actual demo which I found insufficient to demo something I put ~100 hours into developing.
The instructions said
should be, not
must, so I made it ten minute long instead. They refused to watch more than five minutes. I mean, fine. That's my fault for forgetting that words can have different weight in academia. Here is the thing. I got awarded good marks for every section. But where did they get the evidence? They didn't actually watch half the video so the last two sections were basically uncovered.
Here is where it gets even better. I noticed I got 7/10 for a section that related to "development tools". My immediate reaction was... what development tools? I never talked about any because that wasn't in the instructions. I reviewed them and it indeed wasn't. But I found that the marking scheme did indeed want us to talk about those.
The marking scheme criteria should correspond to the demo video instructions. For example, one criterion was related to quality assurance. That would be covered by the evaluation section in the demo video. For development tools,
there were no instructions! Meaning that if you follow the university's instructions, you shoot yourself in the foot.
And yet... I GOT 7/10 FOR THAT SECTION ANYWAY!
I NEVER, EVER TALKED ABOUT IT! I'm willing to bet so much money that tons of other students made the same "mistake", if you can call following the instructions from the official assessment brief that. The university didn't want to award them with zero marks because that would be a bad look, so they made them up. That's a conspiracy, I know. But I have plenty of proof that they made up my marks, and I can't be the only student who had this experience.
A few days ago, for a separate assessment, the tutor sent out an announcement email asking students to stop emailing him with complaints about the marks. He claimed that this is a bad approach because the university has a high quality marking system, with multiple steps of quality assurance, that involves multiple tutors in the whole process. I laughed so hard at that announcement. Given my experience, I of course didn't believe them.
I talked about these issues with the student union (because the tutor didn't reply to my email, of course!) and found that the university has a strict no-remark policy. Students cannot request a remark because their academic judgement policy mandates that their staff have such a strict process, mistakes are rare and unlikely. Yeah, sure.
It's good news for me though! My undeserved marks get to stay thanks to those policies. I can't wait to walk out of academia in a few months. I will be so, so happy.
