Case Summaries

The student said the supervision didn’t provide clear guidance and this meant they couldn’t work on the dissertation as quickly as they had wanted to, so the final work was rushed. They also said that the final dissertation project was unfairly marked, didn’t include enough feedback or recognition of strengths.

The provider noted that the student could have raised their concerns at the time they were being supervised. It still looked into the supervision and found no evidence that it was unsatisfactory. It decided that the student’s appeal was essentially a disagreement with the supervisor’s input and with the academic judgment of the examiners. It rejected the student’s appeal.

The student then complained to us. We did not uphold the student’s complaint (we decided it was Not Justified). We agreed that if the student had concerns about their supervision, they could have raised them at the time. The student said to us that they were worried about making a complaint given the power imbalance between themselves and their supervisor. We did not consider this to be a good reason to delay raising concerns in this case. By not raising their concerns before submitting their work, the student did not give the provider the chance to investigate and if necessary, put things right.

In our review we saw that the provider had clearly set out what supervisors were expected to do. It was not the role of the supervisor to comment on every aspect of the student’s work designed to assess individual learning and understanding. From what we saw, the feedback provided was consistent with the mechanisms in place. The supervisor’s emails were framed in a constructive way and had been timely. Some of the delays in the email exchanges had been caused by the student.

We also saw evidence to show that the dissertation was marked in accordance with the provider’s marking and moderation processes, with sufficient reasoning given by markers to explain why the dissertation achieved the mark it did.