By Lasse Frost
lef@adm.au.dk
Last winter the Board of Studies at the School of Law received a total of 51 complaints. Two of these resulted in a higher grade being awarded. In the previous year three grades were raised following a total of 69 complaints. All the other complaints were rejected, with the students involved being given their original grades.
But in future there will be more at stake for both students of law and all other students at the university when they submit a complaint.
This is because changes in the executive order on examinations mean that students complaining about exams held after 1 September 2010 risk getting a lower grade if the new exam assessors feel that the original grade was too generous in relation to the exam performance.
And students can no longer complain about the result of the re-assessment.
Steffen Skovfoged, Development Manager at the University’s administration office, believes that until now it has been too easy to complain without good reason. He calls the previous complaints procedure “peculiar”.
“Of course we have always asked for a few arguments in support of complaints, but students haven’t been obliged to provide such arguments,” he says.
Mikkel Zeuthen, Chairman of the National Union of Students in Denmark (DSF), disagrees completely and is very angry about the changes.
“This simply goes against the principles of administrative law in Denmark. The rights of the individual are no longer protected under the new system,” he says.
Like Steffen Skovfoged, Administration Manager Anette Lund welcomes the change and underlines the importance of one point in particular which does not have much to do with the risk of getting a lower grade.
“In the past we couldn’t re-assess exam assignments with a fresh pair of eyes – but we can do this now,” she says, pointing out that under the law the new re-assessments have to be carried out by new assessors who are not bound by the result of the original assessment.
According to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the exam complaints rules
have been amended simply to ensure that future complaints result in the correct decision being made. But Mikkel Zeuthen does not buy this argument. He believes that the changes are being made because the universities feel they receive far too many complaints about exams, and because complaints have demanded the investment of considerable administrative resources.
“The new rules are a pathetic way to solve an administrative problem,” he says. He’d like to see some statistics proving that the number of exam complaints has been increasing in recent years.
These statistics do not exist, but it is not actually the number of complaints that worries Anette Lund. She would rather have students submitting official complaints than announcing their dissatisfaction to the world at large.
“Complaints improve quality, so we’re always interested in receiving relevant, qualified complaints about exams or anything else,” she says.
