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Academic regulations 2012-13

What to do if you believe adverse circumstances impaired your academic performance or if you wish to make an appeal.

Adverse circumstances

Normally, we would expect students to contact us if they faced adverse circumstances and were seeking an extension for an assessment submission. For details, please see page 15 of the ‘Art and Design Studies, Guide to Study and Assessment’

If there is new information, or if you feel that adverse circumstances affected your performance even though you had been given extra time, you are entitled to bring this information to the attention of the Office of Lifelong Learning.

Who to contact

You should contact Robbie Bushe, Art and Design Studies Coordinator in writing as early as possible before the following dates for each session assessments

You must provide relevant documentary evidence, such as a medical certificate.

  • Robbie Bushe
  • Art and Design Studies Coordinator
  • University of Edinburgh
  • Paterson's Land
  • Holyrood Road
  • Edinburgh
  • EH8 8AQ
  • Work: +44 (0)131 650 4400
Email:

What happens next?

Your case will be considered by OLL’s Special Circumstances Committee, which meets in March before the Final Assessment Board, and we will write to you to let you know the outcome of your case.

Please note that in order for a change of mark to be considered for an assessment on a 10-credit course, substantial evidence of attainment in another assessment or assessments would be needed. Further information about the Special Circumstances Committee is available in PDF (requires a PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader).

Grounds for appeal

An academic appeal is a request for a decision made by the Final Assessment Board to be reconsidered. There are limited grounds for appeal:

(a) substantial information directly relevant to the quality of performance in the seen or unseen assessments which for good reason was not available to the Final Assessment Board when their decision was taken.

(b) alleged irregular procedure or improper conduct of an assessment. For this purpose “conduct of an assessment” includes conduct of a meeting of the Final Assessment Board.

If you have concerns about some aspect of your academic performance or assessment that were not made available to the Board, you should first of all raise these concerns as soon as possible with Robbie Bushe. Often such initial discussions fully address the student’s concerns without the need for a formal appeal.

How to submit an appeal

If you decide, after you have raised your concerns, to submit an appeal then you should send your submission in writing (by email if possible) to academic.appeals@ed.ac.uk. If you would prefer to submit your appeal by post, please send the information to:

Academic Appeals

Academic Appeals, Academic Registry

The University of Edinburgh

Old College, South Bridge

Edinburgh, EH8 9YL

as soon as possible, and no later than two weeks of receiving your record of credit.

Please note:

In order to ensure that the Final Assessment Board can take decisions based on all the relevant information, students should already have contacted Robbie Bushe to make sure that information about circumstances which might affect the outcome of their assessment - illness, conduct of an assessment, other personal circumstances - had been made available to the Final Assessment Board before it first met.

University regulations clearly state: "Ignorance of the requirement [..] to report timeously factors which may have adversely affected [your] performance, or failure to report such factors on the basis that [you] did not anticipate an unsatisfactory result in the examination, can never by themselves constitute good reason".

How long will it take?

You should be aware that the process of considering an academic appeal does take some time, with timescales being measured in weeks rather than days. For instance, after submitting your letter of appeal we will gather relevant factual information from the Convenor of the Final Assessment Board and any other relevant staff.

Whilst we aim to keep the process moving as swiftly as possible, the average time for a full appeal is 9 to 10 weeks.

This article was published on Mar 26, 2013


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