The start of the new academic year is an exciting time, as students return refreshed from their months off school, having all but erased the wooden desks of Kinsella Hall from their memory. Not so, however, for those emerging out of resits, many of whom are forced to deal with an array of logistical issues as they either head straight into the new term or scramble to put together plans for a year off-books. While resitting exams is by nature a highly stressful prospect, many aspects of Trinity’s reassessment system make it all the more uncertain and difficult.
The very scheduling of supplemental exams and results is a major source of stress for many students. Reassessment results come out a mere week before the start of term, offering students hardly any time to prepare for the next year’s accommodation, work and future courses — all the more so for international students, for whom uncertainty about where and what they will be doing in the year ahead takes on an additional financial and mental burden.
The lateness of repeat results also impacts official transcripts, which can in many cases handicap graduating students looking to continue their education, forcing them to defer or give up postgraduate courses they have been accepted into, even within universities in Ireland. Trinity is not entirely at fault for this — after all, they cannot control the acceptance and scheduling practices of other institutions. However, official transcripts for students resitting exams come out a whole month after the results themselves, creating a delay that causes unnecessary issues. Moreover, it is remarkable that no regularised system exists to avoid such clashes within Irish higher education institutions.
More egregiously, systems within Trinity do not always take students sitting repeat exams into account either, leading to highly frustrating Catch-22 situations within the College itself. Students who are registered for on-campus accommodation in the next year, for example, receive bills from Trinity for their rent before knowing if they have passed their reassessment exams or not, and therefore if they are even able to reside in Trinity accommodation; however, they are also blocked from seeing their results until they pay their outstanding College bills, which includes the first month of their rent. These are systematic issues that show that students resitting exams are not prioritised, or even taken into account, during these stressful and uncertain months of their time in university.
Other issues with the reassessment system have seen much debate in Trinity over the past years. There is the issue of modular billing, for one: currently, students who fail even just one exam must pay tuition fees for the whole year in order to repeat, and there have been calls for the College to charge students only for the modules they have failed. (Trinity’s plans to do this in 2018 and 2019 were scrapped when students protested the accompanying addition of a €450 fee for students resitting exams.) Students who want to repeat the year off-books with assessment instead must demonstrate medical and financial reasons in a process that the Senior Tutor in 2019 called “draconian”.
The reassessment period is already a time of intense stress and uncertainty. Rather than exacerbating this with further financial and mental burdens for students to bear, College must do all that it can to allow those resitting exams to focus on studying and passing into their next year.
