Mental Health Module Complaint

Following the examination on 18th May 2010 for the PSY340 Mental Health and Illness module, the students hereby lodge an official complaint with regards to repeated disturbances that were not dealt with by the invigilators. We have come to the decision that it is necessary to voice our concerns as we feel the incident negatively affected our assessment performance. During the examination, a mobile phone received a message which continued to alert the owner periodically for the remainder of the examination. Initially the disturbance was ignored but as it repeatedly sounded, Dr. asked “could whoever owns that phone please turn it off”. Despite this request, no one claimed ownership of the mobile phone and it continued to sound. Further on in the examination, the mobile phone was located by invigilators to be at the entrance to the room, but the bag that contained it was not isolated; the mobile phone was allowed to continue to ring until completion of the examination. Following the examination, the owner of said mobile phone was not approached upon leaving the room. We feel that the prolonged disturbance was in breach of assessment rules and regulations, which state that mobile phones must be switched off and if they cause a disturbance, must be confiscated with the owner being notified that they were in breach of examination rules. This should then have been reported to the examination board within 24 hours. As this has occurred in a final year exam, we consider the way the disturbance was dealt with as extremely unprofessional. We also feel that it will be detrimental to our final marks as we were all distracted, thus meaning we did not perform to our full potential. The students would also like to notify the Department of Psychology about previous problems which we feel were not fully addressed, as well as further concerns we have in relation to the module. We contacted our student representative, Zoumiya Kouache, who raised our original concerns in a meeting of the Psychology Student Staff Liaison Committee on 17th November 2009. We cited two main problems: a lack of introductory lecture and information about the assessment that was due on 17th December 2009. Following on from this meeting we were given a brief introduction to the module, which when compared to other introductory lectures, was not up to the standards set by the department. We were also given a brief outline of what was expected from our assessments but we feel that we were not given adequate information and advice. As well as these problems, the module is badly structured, poorly taught and it is often difficult to understand what is required. On multiple occasions, when students arrived for a seminar we were asked “what do you want to talk about?” regarding the previous lecture. These seminars were directly after the lecture and did not enable students to have knowledge of the area. Because of this, the seminar was often awkward and wasted as we sat in silence, giving us no understanding of the module content. We think that having no lesson plan is unprofessional, unorganised and unacceptable. The lectures were of a similar quality and we feel as if we did not learn a great deal, meaning that revision for the examination was difficult. This leads up to the two remaining issues that we would like to raise, as they occurred in the final two lectures. In the penultimate lecture, we were given the opportunity to give feedback. A number of students witnessed Dr. read this feedback directly after being handed it. We feel that this is a violation of our right to give confidential feedback, and her comments in the final lecture make us feel that our concerns were justified. She began the lecture by discussing comments that the class had made, appearing to twist them into positives and ignoring our concerns. Some students also feel that she was criticising some of the feedback. These two factors combined has resulted in our confidence in her fairly marking our papers being damaged. After having commented on our feedback, Dr. proceeded to give a revision lecture for the examination. After being told we should revise everything that we have covered, students chose to revise the areas we felt we had spent more time covering in lectures and seminars, for example intervention, working with young people and PTSD. Some students feel we were misled because these issues did not appear on the exam, with one question featuring religion; we feel we did not study this topic thoroughly from a psychological perspective. Religion was also not mentioned in the exam revision lecture which stated all of the topics we thought we had covered. The exam also featured a question about personality disorders, which specifically required knowledge of attachment. However, we feel that this particular question was unfair because in the lecture we were given about personality disorders, attachment was only mentioned on two slides. In hindsight, the lecture only mentioned attachment in passing, making it difficult to determine as important enough to give special attention to in revision. This was a problem on a number of lectures, as topics were vaguely taught meaning that it was difficult to establish which factors were of importance to the main topic. We did complain in the feedback that we felt the lectures were not very informative, and the only learning we had managed to do was by ourselves. She turned this into a positive by saying she was glad we were doing further reading – but it was not structured further learning; often it was desperately scanning textbooks to try and teach ourselves because we had not gained enough information in lectures to guide us properly. This made us feel as though our feedback has fallen on deaf ears. In conclusion, we feel that this formal complaint is a necessary step in order to have our concerns taken seriously and addressed in a proper manner. We did not want to submit a formal complaint, but because of recent events we felt that we had no other option, especially because of the unprofessional nature of the examination. The students hope that this issue will be dealt with swiftly and fairly, addressing our concerns of a negative impact on our degrees. The following students support this complaint.