Trinity incorrectly informed 13 students studying TSM or joint-honours courses that they would have to repeat exams, after complications arose over the marking of students’ grades this year.
In an email sent to staff on July 15th, Andrea Yeates, TSM Course Administrator, said that the TSM and Trinity Joint-Honours Course Office reviewed all results after Senior Lecturer Kevin Mitchell had sent out “revised instructions on the aggregation rule for this year’s annual results”.
Yeates said that “for the Annual Session we correctly applied first compensation and then aggregation to all results. This new instruction advises us to combine both regulations which we have now done”.
On July 13th, Mitchell sent a memo to staff flagging “inconsistencies in how those regulations were interpreted, in particular in relation to how compensation and aggregation regulations could be jointly applied”.
Mitchell said that students who had failed modules in the first semester that could be compensated passed the year if their overall grade was 40 per cent or above, even if they failed modules in the second term.
“It is now clear that not all courses or courts of examiners applied that logic, meaning some students have been scheduled for reassessment who should have been progressed to the next year”, he said.
“To be consistent and fair”, he added, “we must now revisit those student records and ensure that all students who should have progressed under that procedure now are progressed”.
Seven first-year students studying a joint-honours course and six second-year students studying a TSM course had been erroneously told that they would have to repeat exams.
In the wake of the pandemic, College made a number of allowances for students sitting exams last year. Students could defer assessments without proof, either before or after sitting the exams.
Students were also allowed to resit modules that counted towards their degree even if they passed the original exams, and graduating students’ transcripts acknowledged what exams had been sat during the pandemic.
Finally, College urged the Board of Examiners to use discretionary powers with “greater latitude” and students who got a 40 per cent grade overall could pass the year, even if they had failed modules.
