This ought to be an exciting time of year for students graduating from university. In the usual run of things, it is when they anxiously await their grades and plan for the rest of their lives. Future studies, jobs, whole career paths can hang on the difference between a first and a 2.1, or a third and a fail. Universities vary in when they release results but they are usually all out by the first week of July.
This year things are different. It looks like some of them won’t even get a mark at all, let alone a pass or fail. The latest front in the ongoing industrial action by British academics, which has been simmering, on and off, for five years, is to leave exam papers unmarked while they are on strike. As a result, thousands of students up and down the country face the prospect of graduating with a provisional grade or not getting one at all. It is yet another period of limbo for a generation that has had its education repeatedly disrupted, first by the pandemic and then by academic upheaval.
One of the students affected is Ben Hutchison, a modern languages student at Durham in his fourth and final year.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” he says. “The university – and I think this is the case nationally – seems blase about what’s happening, and is keen to paint itself as the good guy. But equally doesn’t demonise the strikers. They just don’t have a clear plan. That’s the most irritating thing.”
