The refusal by NUI Galway to waive the student exam repeat fee of €295 has been branded as hypocritical by the vice-president of NUIG Students’ Union, Róisín Nic Lochlainn.
Ms Nic Lochlainn’s comments come as the university rolled out its new Cúram Dá Chéile initiative on Friday, which asks the student population ‘to support the need for a deepened sense of maturity and responsibility for the collective good for the new academic year’.
However, the students’ union vice-president said while she supports the initiative, its message of showing solidarity conflicts with the university’s stance on exam repeat fees.
She said; “The university’s new community promise is completely hypocritical. It asks students for empathy with regards to the wider community and the spread of Covid-19 but where is the empathy for students when it comes to waiving the repeat fees?
“The bursar of the university thinks [the fees] are modest but if you are studying languages for example, your repeat exam may be a five minute oral over Zoom and you have to pay €295 for that.
“The university management seems so far removed from reality. They don’t seem to grasp we are living through a pandemic. It is easy for them to say it is affordable because they have full-time jobs [but] there are many students who may have lost their part-time jobs due to the pandemic so they are already under financial stress and being asked to pay this [amount] will only create more stress as they cannot afford it.
“So much for empathy. It’s just hypocrisy.”
People Before Profit NUIG spokesperson, Cian Mortimer, echoed Ms Nic Lochlainn’s sentiments describing the repeat fees as an “extortion of students”.
He said; “The cost of running a repeat examination in a regular year works out to €10.98 per exam. However, this is not a regular year, and the costs of running these repeat exams will be reduced due to the exams taking place online. Despite this though, NUI Galway are still insisting on charging €295 per student, astronomical compared to the actual cost of the exams.
“On average, between 2014 and 2019, 2,607 students per year sat repeat exams in NUI Galway. This means that brought in an average of over €769,000 per year on repeat examinations alone, working out an average profit margin of over €586,000. This is a complete extortion of students who already under a number of huge financial burdens- such as university fees and rent. This puts massive stress on students, trying to juggle college, work, and other aspects of their lives.
“It is time for NUI Galway to scrap their repeat exam fee. The large cost of repeat exams is completely unfair any year, given the real cost of running the exams and the concurrent grade capping. However, particularly this year given the disruption to the year by Covid-19 and the financial stress that many students and families are under, it is absolutely disgraceful that the university are insisting on charging the fee.”
A spokesperson for NUI Galway said the fees support all costs associated with repeats and have remained unchanged from last year.
“Our university is mindful of the financial challenges faced by our students at this time, and we have been doing our utmost to support students in need through our financial aid fund, which has been extended this year, and through other means such as early refunds of rents to students leaving our accommodation because of Covid-19, by being more lenient with regard to programme deferral and by applying a more flexible policy of refunding deposits for our programmes.
“As NUI Galway charges a flat repeat fee (which has previously been welcomed by our Students’ Union as not disadvantaging students repeating more than one module ) and other universities charge a repeat fee per module, more than 99 per cent of students subject to the fee will pay less than in any of the other universities charging this fee.
“Students who are in the most need of financial support can apply for a fee waiver for repeat exam fees. There is no fee for deferrals, and the repeat exam fee, which is unchanged from last year, supports all costs associated with repeats, from the setting and correcting of assignments in a more challenging context this year, to the hosting of exams online and the awarding of results. By supporting the cost of repeat exams in this way, this cost is not cross-subsidised by other students or drawing on other resources that the university devotes to and for our students.”
At the of writing, GMIT, Trinity, UCC, QUB, DCU, and NUI Maynooth have agreed to waive their exam repeat fees.
