There is no medical certificate for grief. There is no predictability to bereavement. There is no signed docket from a doctor telling you when you will be fit to sit an exam or to warn you about when a wave will hit, leaving you – once capably reading your notes in the library – silently shaking against a locked door in the Ussher bathroom.
Even where there are medical certificates, sometimes there is no planning for what the future will bring. Will your illness progress? How much is it affecting you? Do you think you’ll fail or just drop a grade? Can you accept either? The list of the extenuating circumstances that affect students every day is endless.
What’s more is that these things do not strike at convenient times. Indeed, sometimes they crop up at the worst possible moment. When that is the case, more support than usual is needed. And much as I would like to say that in my own experience of times of pain, fear and uncertainty, Trinity has been supportive and has reacted compassionately to ease what stresses they can, in all truth all that College has done is worsen things.
There is an unacceptable lack of clarity around the procedures for repeating or deferring exams, especially in final year. The system with regard to repeating the year is also hopelessly opaque. What information I had been given before was hearsay, gathered from snippets of conversations or library corridor gossip. Nobody seems to want to tell you what you need before you really need it, and by then it may well be too late to act. On further research, the Trinity website directs you to an out-of-date page that will only tell you what your fee status might be if you could repeat, but not whether you can.
There is no medical certificate for grief. There is no predictability to bereavement
If you’ve been clever in your search you’ll finally come across the thousands-of-pages-long Academic Calendar, unhelpfully hidden deep within the pages of the academic registry’s website. You may then take pleasure in decoding it. You might learn some basic facts about your degree – it came as a surprise to me that I was about to sit moderatorship exams for instance. In a separate document, they might tell you that if you’re unable to sit an exam in final year, in special circumstances you can get a degree aegrotat. I had to google what that meant – they don’t tell you, nor will they tell you what the special circumstances are.
There is also a document describing something called an appeal ad misericordiam. This is College’s attempt to consolidate all the information about extenuating circumstances into one place and demystify the appeals process, but this too is not enough. For one thing, this information only comes perhaps when it is too late – when you have failed an exam and need to argue to progress in College. For another, it’s hopelessly difficult to find, unless perhaps you know what you’re looking for. Four years in Trinity have left me hopelessly incapable of divining what College means in the fragments and half-explained snippets that its administration provides to students like me – alone, afraid, worrying if what’s going on in their lives might cause them to lose everything they’ve worked towards for four years. Worrying about what’s going on in their lives full-stop.
When you are fearful for the future, the least College could do is to provide clear, comprehensive and non-contradictory facts about where you stand. The fact that it doesn’t causes unnecessary stress in an already-stressful situation. To be clear, it is not my degree that I charge with this failure to understand, but an administration that, worse than doing nothing, seems to go out of its way to avoid making itself clear and understandable to struggling students. There is no one place that answers your concerns. There are several, each with differing advice or dire warning, none of which seem to fully know what to say, and none of whom seem to have communicated with each other.
Of course, you can go and ask your tutor and TCDSU, and though I have found both of these bodies to be supportive and willing to help, something for which I am very grateful, they may not always ease your confusion. For one thing, you may not even get the answers you need unless you already know what questions to ask in the first place. Similarly, some students’ tutors do not belong to their faculty and are themselves unfamiliar with processes, or specific hardships or rules that come along with certain disciplines. Some tutors are new to College and are as unfamiliar with the structures as you are. You may have never needed your tutor before, and you may not have a relationship with them at all. Just finding out what your options are, and trying to make others understand your circumstances, can be an endless saga of emailing, meetings, frantic googling, and trying to simultaneously ignore and tune into an endless rumour mill – just in case they mention something you didn’t know to ask about.
But if you have cleared this barrier and filled in the chasms in your knowledge – and well done to you – you will find only hard answers. In terms of compassionate measures in place for final-year students with extenuating circumstances at exam time, the options are as follows: sit your exams in May. Hope for the best. Or defer your exams until August and hope for the best.
Until next year and the reforms of the Trinity Education Project – the future of which too, looks uncertain – there are no repeats in final year. If you fail the module you fail the module. If you fail the year, you leave without an honours degree. The level eight qualification you worked for and paid for becomes a level seven qualification – a fine achievement, but not the one you have strived for during the last four years of your life.
If your grade is unreflective of your ability under ordinary circumstances, that is your grade. In specific and special circumstances (and again, no indication of what those might be) you may be able to repeat the year “off-books with assessment”, but as I have learned, this is not typically the “done thing” in Trinity. It seems then, that the done thing is to say to students that “we’re very sorry for your loss, but do you think you could just get over it?”
This is, simply put, outrageously unfair. That those most in need of support or options are presented with a set of exams they may well be unable to sit, or taking a gamble and hoping that all will be well by August, is a shameful indictment of Trinity’s attitude of disregard toward its student body. It is emblematic of an administration that sees us as numbers – get them the degree, any degree, and get them out – potential, grief or illness be damned. The machine thunders on and if some of us fall under its wheels, so be it.
Vulnerable students have enough to worry about without having to fathom impenetrable bureaucratic structures
But disregard is kind to the policy – it takes it at its best. At its worst, it only aggravates the stress and fear of students who need support the most. The options presented to you ask you to sit a set of exams, the outcome of which may well erase four years of work over one thing that wasn’t your fault, or to decide what you are going to do about your entire degree at a time when maybe all you want to do is collapse in a corner somewhere and cry. There is no room for second chances or for getting it wrong. College asks you to fight to even know what decisions you can make, and then presents you with an unsympathetic, all-or-nothing binary that doesn’t care about or even account for adversity.
Maybe the Trinity Education Project will fix things. Certainly, repeat exams for final-year students will help. But for now, we have an unacceptably callous and outdated mode of dealing with students with extenuating circumstances. At a time when young and vulnerable people should be focused on grieving, or getting better, or any one of the hundreds of things that could affect us, College offers little support, no flexibility, no compassion for those whose grades it touts on rankings websites, whose testimonies it uses to promote itself in a glossy prospectus, whose achievements it claims for its own.
Vulnerable students have enough to worry about without having to fathom impenetrable bureaucratic structures. They shouldn’t be forced into making potentially life and career-altering decisions at a time of great fear or uncertainty or to fight tooth and nail for any consideration from a university that doesn’t seem to even want to care.
