First Year Student Satisfaction

There has been no opportunity in the CSC1032 module to provide anonymous feedback. Resultantly, it is impossible to provide actual feedback. Given that there is no option to provide feedback for the CSC1032 module, please excuse me providing it here.

We have received no lectures, no communication and shockingly poor exam preparation materials for this module. I have attended the vast majority of practical's, and have never yet met the lecturer. I have not attended the drop-in sessions due to receiving a strongly worded email (via Canvas/NESS) stating in no uncertain terms to not join these sessions without valid reason to do so.

Moreover, the resources provided are not refreshed for this academic year, use a poor quality microphone with auto-generated (and thus inaccurate) subtitles, and all-in-all make it incredibly difficult for a 100% remote module (in terms of teaching) to actually concentrate on the workload assigned.

Frankly, it is incredibly disappointing that this module seems to have been given an utter lack of attention by the school of computing, and that students struggle to provide feedback to the University on this matter.

Given the dropping student satisfaction rates over the last two years (2021 and 2022, source: thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk), I'm incredibly surprised to see this lack of attention being provided by the University.

This concern has been raised by the Student-Staff Committee (SSC), through the Course and Stage representatives, and the result from the academic staff has largely been a dismissive one.

For more context to my concerns regarding the preparation to CSC1032's exam, I will contextualise it in contrast to CSC1031.

In CSC1031, we were told that we would be using Inspera to complete the assessment. In order to allow us to prepare, our lecturer created a mock exam, with five duplicates, on the platform. This allowed us to understand a) the bar set for the exam, b) what the questions will look like in the exam, and c) how long the exam will be in terms of questions.

We had one mock exam in CSC1032, which was time-limited to 90 minutes (by contrast, the CSC1031 mock had no time limit), and could only be attempted once.

This did not allow us to properly study the exam style, did not use the same platform, and, worst of all, closed 11 days prior to the start of the exam. The mock exam, the best resource to get an idea of what to expect in the exam was completely shut off from student access eleven days prior to the exam starting.

I was confused about this, so I contacted the lecturer to request an explanation, or for the resource to be re-opened. The response I got was as follows:

"To keep the module consistent and fair to all students, I cannot grant extended access to the mock exam. Note that I have sent multiple announcement about the timeline of taking the Mock exam:"

One of my course-mates had also contacted the University on this matter, and received a word-for-word response.

The issue with the 'timeline of taking the Mock exam', is that we had other exams which occurred before this exam closed. Resultantly we did not have adequate time to take it. I would also benefit from an explanation as to why the mock exam had been shut in the first place. There is no reason to restrict access to students for studying. Question 1.24 is in regards to mental health, and the fact that the University (or at least a representative of the University) has shut access to a mock exam. For a self-marking exam which requires no effort on the schools part post-opening, we should have unlimited attempts.

It should be expected of students to be able to balance their time, their commitments and their studies. Locking a mock exam to a set timeline, locking it to a set period of time to compete and locking it to a single attempt invalidates the idea of independent study, and is whole-heartedly unnecessary for student study.

I would strongly appreciate it if the University could communicate (en-masse) in the near future to address this serious issue which has affected the Semester exam period. I would be incredibly disappointed to see my feedback go unnoticed, especially given past responses from the academic school to the way that the issue of this module's abysmal communication and care.

I want to also raise a note about CSC1033, with Dr John Colquhoun and Dr Dan Nesbitt. John and Dan have both been incredible - with clear and attentive notes, fast and personalised responses to email communication, and delivering lectures in an engaging and 'fun' manner, which saw huge student engagement, and, in private communication (social media group chats et cetera), has been unanimously highly regarded.

Teaching in CSC1031 and CSC1034 has also been of high standard, with very good communication from all lecturers, good materials and notes and general friendliness from all involved in the presentation and delivery of this module.

Thank you for taking the time to read this message.