UCL has sneakily introduced a new attendance policy that not only makes it harder to get away with sleeping through your 9am lecture, but is also giving depart- ments a huge administrative headache. Any absence now has to be recorded and justified, and Home Secretary Theresa May is likely to blame.
Although the changes have gone lar- egly unnoticed – mostly because lecturers aren’t enforcing them – this term students are required to provide a satisfactory ex- planation for missing even one lecture, which in turn has to be approved by a departmental tutor. This has led to staff complaining about reams of paperwork, and a whole load of freshers wondering how easy it is to fake a doctor’s note the morning after sportsnite.
Many staff have been left in the dark as to the justification for the draconian changes, which have drawn the inevitable Orwellian comparisons, but The Cheese Grater has learned that it’s a result of in- creased government scrutiny of non-EU students’ ‘Tier 4’ visas. This has been an issue since London Metropolitan Univer- sity had its licence to recruit international students suspended in 2012, after poor monitoring of attendance and participa- tion left student visas open to abuse. UCL is coming under similar pressure, and uni- versity managers are turning to Stasi-style surveillance to reassure the Home Office.
Last month UCL warned staff of an upcoming audit, which will involve UK Visas and Immigration “check- ing large numbers of student files for evidence that we have records dem- onstrating that students are engaged, and that, where this is not the case, we have followed up and recorded reasons”. The university insisted “We have to be able to show that students are attending but also engaging in their studies”. This has led to a scram- ble to start obsessively monitoring the movements of every single student, not just non-EU students, presumably to avoid accusations of any unfair dis- crimination.
Lukas Wahden, a second year ESPS student, complained to his depart- ment that UCL was treating students like “semi-demented cash cows”, and that “the unchecked passing on of potentially sensitive medical or per- sonal data is something that I refuse to consent to in the absence of… prior explanation of the new policy.” Lukas told The Cheese Grater “As long as we meet our 70% attendance require- ment for all of our assessed modules, the reasons for absences are none of the university’s business… The deci- sion about whether an absence from class is justifiable lies with none other but the individual student and his or her academic conscience.”
While students might worry about the sharing and recording of sensi- tive data, departments have it just as bad, facing an avalanche of admin in their efforts to monitor and justify all absences. Larger departments like Economics or SELCS will struggle the most, with one staff member even suggesting that the only realistic way to implement the new policy would be to employ someone specifically to deal with attendance. At the moment, the majority of absences are still going unchecked, as staff simply can’t chase up every single one.
The changes have been raised at numerous meetings of UCL’s Educa- tion Committee, made up of faculty big dogs and chaired by Vice-Provost of Education Anthony Smith. Each time, concerns were raised about “workload implications” for depart- ments, and as recently as 6th October staff still had “reservations about the practical implications of the new re- quirements”. Despite this the changes were pushed through by Smith way back in August.
Professor Smith told The Cheese Grater that “I believe this change will better enable us ensure that our stu- dents are able to study, and provide us with an early alert when they are not doing so, so we can offer them sup- port at the earliest opportunity.”
Whether or not lecturers will actu- ally be able to enact to the new regula- tions is yet to be seen, but considering UCL had over 9000 students enrolled from outside the EU last year, the uni better have its excuses ready when the Home Secretary comes knocking.