More Stupid Than the Others

As a student ambassador and course rep for my advertising & brand management homies, I listen to a lot of complaints and pass them onto the very nice people from our union who call me every now and then to check on the overall mood. It’s always at the beginning of the year, after Christmas/New Year and before or after exams.

Beginning of the year because some people either can’t see their modules on the intranet, haven’t been assigned, others haven’t been transferred from various courses and we all need to be able to see announcements posted on it.

Christmas and New Year because everyone has a change of heart after the first assignments are due in, more are just about to be due, heat rises and no one’s happy with group work, how they’re being handled, demands, so on and so forth.

Before and after exams because exams, despite being carefully planned, are a type of hit or miss thing. Some have very good dates (take mine: 5, 8, 11 May 2009 which meant I finished early and had a few days between the three) while others are clear misses: 5th of May at 3PM and then 6th of May at 9AM. The exam schedule has to suffer from some changes when these things happen but as you’d expect everyone moans. Post exams, there’s the moan about how easy/hard it was and resits but that’s a different story I’d rather not think about.

Part of listening to all the moaning is to improve standings in surveys, tables, ranks, who knows, I tend to see them as something above and beyond me that I don’t think much about (not being in the whole academic business). Yet across all our faculties, the results are disappointing and there are a lot of bad vibes due to logistics. I may be untrained in logistics but I always thought problems come when you want to do the right thing but fail somewhere on the way due to lack of communication and preparation of some sorts. Better even, when you lack the power to plan. Like the exam dates: plan them three months in advance and release perfect versions of them rather than plan them two days before and then confuse everyone by putting up an ‘updated version’.

I sometimes can’t believe how easy it is to ‘miss’. We’ve been issued a message on the intranet saying our results will be delivered by first class post over the period of three weeks. Be at home. Sign for them! I gulped and panicked a bit because I don’t spend my day at home and there would be no one to sign for it. I wrote an email to the undergraduate office and got no reply back (two weeks ago if not longer). I called but no one picked up the phone (it was a decent hour too). No wonder it’s doing so bad in surveys. Website gives me at least 40 email addresses (slight exaggeration, ok) but none that might address my problem as it is. Insert an apologetic email and ask them to forward it to the right department. Bloody confusing to get an answer.

Why ‘Backwards’? Because I’ve just asked a very kind lady face to face why we are still being sent all this via post when there are so many ways of putting results up online in a very secure way. I lack the actual knowledge but I’d be shocked if someone said you can’t for a reasonable price. I asked why we have to sign for them since we’re all going to be away with festivals, drugs, music, parents, beaches, who knows. She said others have called in for the same reason – and that  you only have to sign if you failed one or more exams. But that out of those three weeks they mentioned, naturally they are being sent on the last day of the third week.

Bummer.