De Montfort University of Disgrace
[Abridged version of “De Montfort University: My Student Experience and the Law” by Victor Smith.]
The full details of my experience with DMU and its disregard for educational standards or compliance with its promises and procedures can be found in my article "De Montfort University: My Student Experience and the Law".
For those who are more concerned with DMU's conduct than with the legal niceties of whether DMU's failings amount to breaches of contract, I have set out this synopsis.
I paid £8,000 for a distance learning course at DMU studying for a Master's degree in Food Law. I passed the prerequisite module with distinction (80%) and, in due course, obtained a distinction in all modules including my dissertation. In respect of one early module, however, I was only awarded 68% for one of its two assignments; less than the 70% required for a distinction in that individual assignment. I was not to know, at the time, that I would achieve higher marks in all my subsequent work such that this relatively low mark would not affect my overall grade. In any event, of more concern to me was, not the grade but, the fact that the assessor had marked me down on the basis that my answers could have been "improved" by adding certain information which he set out in various comments he wrote against my script. Many of those comments were factually wrong. For example, the assessor said that certain legislation stated that "minced beef must be no more than 20% fat". In the context of my assignment, that was not true. It was only when "minced pure beef" was used as the name of the food, that the legislation required that its fat content should be no more than 20%. The minced meat in question was not sold as minced pure beef, but was merely an ingredient in a cafeteria meal sold as a "cottage pie". The reality was that there was no prohibition on the fat content of the minced meat ingredient of a cottage pie exceeding 20% fat. Moreover, there was no requirement that the meat in a cottage pie should be beef at all and there was absolutely no suggestion in the question that the meat used was beef.
In other comments, the assessor asserted that certain case law was authority for certain propositions when that was manifestly not true. He also confused the elements of an offence in one provision of key food law legislation with that of another. He commented on alleged omissions in my answers without observing that I had already dealt with those points or had gone on to do so.
I decided that the assessor's errors were so grave that they should be challenged. I bore in mind that the assessor was likely to have made similar errors in the marking of other student's assignments and was likely to do so again in the future. In the case of other student's, such errors could have been far more important than in my case and may have meant the difference between a student passing or failing.
DMU's Academic Appeals Procedure had a prescribed method for a student to appeal against errors made in the marking process. That procedure did not give a student the option of challenging an assessor's comments directly with the assessor.
The time limit for an appeal commenced from a specified "published date", but no such date was published. I had to speculate on what that date should have been based on other information I had to hunt for.
Although the procedure expressly allowed a student to appeal against a decision "concerning an assessment outcome in a module", that basis for appealing was omitted from DMU's prescribed Appeal Form. It meant that a student not entirely familiar with the procedure itself would wrongly think they could not appeal against the outcome of an assessment.
The procedure was also ambiguous. It said a student could appeal on the grounds that:
"There are alleged errors in the process of marking and/or consequent decision making. The outcome of the assessment differs so markedly from the candidate's reasonable expectations as to raise reasonable doubt as to whether the process has been properly conducted."
It was not explained whether each of the above two sentences constituted a separate ground of appeal or whether they were two elements of the same ground both of which had to be proved. In other words, should the two sentences be read as though linked by an "or" or by the word "and"? Curiously, the Appeal Form linked the two sentences with the word "because" which meant that the way to prove errors in the marking process was not by producing direct evidence thereof, but by showing there to be a marked difference between the student's reasonable expectations and the actual outcome of the assessment.
So as not to be caught out by the ambiguity in the procedure, I alleged both that there were errors in the marking process (the assessor's erroneous comments) and also that the outcome did not meet my expectations because the mark of 68% differed markedly from the mark of 80% I had obtained in my prerequisite module. The procedure expressly gave the example of making a comparison with a prerequisite mark as an example of how to demonstrate the required marked difference.
Instead of DMU hearing my appeal, its "Assistant SACO" wrote to inform me that she had decided to dismiss my appeal without a hearing because, in her view, I was "simply questioning the academic judgement" of the assessor. A contemporaneous letter from the Student Appeals & Conduct Officer ("SACO") told me that the decision to dismiss my appeal was final.
I was, and remain, adamant that I was not "simply questioning the academic judgement" of the assessor. Firstly, my appeal was not questioning academic judgement" and certainly not "simply" doing so; it was questioning factual errors. In DMU's subsequent evidence it equated "questioning the academic judgment of the assessor" with "arguing with the assessor's comments" thus not only ignoring the import of the word "simply" but assuming that any challenge to what an academic says is automatically the questioning of academic judgment. On that basis DMU's assessors are inviolable and the right to appeal is meaningless.
Secondly, the use of the word "because", which DMU was later to assert in evidence should be read as linking the two sentences of the grounds of appeal, meant that my appeal should, in any event, have been heard on the basis of the marked difference between 68% and 80%. Given that the "pass" level (50%), the "merit" level (60%) and the "distinction" level (70%) are each separated by 10 percentage points, the 12-percentage point difference between 68% and 80% should have meant that my appeal was at least considered.
I also noted that the dismissal of my appeal by the unempowered Assistant SACO was in breach of the Appeals Procedure and that it was only a decision by the SACO (and not the Assistant SACO) which was final. I therefore decided to invoke DMU's Student Complaints Procedure according to which:
"De Montfort University recognises the importance of effective complaints management as both a tool and a source of information for service improvement. The university welcomes feedback from all our students and recognises the right of students or alumni to raise issues of concern about the services provided by the university which may affect the quality of their student experience."
It turned out that DMU's Complaints Procedure was a sham. DMU did not "welcome" my feedback, it was not concerned with service improvement or student welfare and it was not concerned with following any part of its procedure.
As required by the procedure, I made my student complaint to the local manager who promised to "look into this as soon as possible for you".
DMU is good at making empty promises. I did not hear from the local manager again. At no time has DMU informed me what, if anything, the local manager did in pursuance of either his promise or the procedure.
Five months after DMU's promise to look into my student complaint, I received an email entitled: "A message from the Interim Vice-Chancellor" addressed to all DMU's students. That email included the following:
"I'd like to commit us as a university to always strive to offer the best student experience, teaching and research possible. My goal is simple, to work with everyone at DMU to positively impact your time at university and enable you to flourish in your future careers. … There are various ways that you can get in touch. … You can … send an email to askus@dmu.ac.uk which will be shared with me and my team for a response. I look forward to hearing your views and ideas in the future."
Six weeks later, I received an email from DMU's "Faculty Postgraduate Marketing and Recruitment Assistant". She said that I had been "personally recommended by an academic as somebody to reach out to" in providing a "student success story" for DMU's promotional material. She said that I should not hesitate to contact her if I had any questions. I responded by pointing out that, in the circumstances of my unresolved grievances, her email was quite inappropriate and insensitive. I warned her that the only promotional input I had was negative and that, as someone concerned with DMU's reputation, she might want to see that some action was taken on my student complaint before I had to resort to a formal letter before action.
Eight months having elapsed since DMU's broken promise to look into my complaint as soon as possible, I wrote to askus@dmu.ac.uk for the personal attention of the Vice Chancellor pursuant to his email in which he had committed DMU to offering "the best student experience" and calling for "views and ideas". I pointed out that DMU was in breach of contract and that it had demonstrated a lack of concern for both education and student welfare by failing to follow its procedures and not even being prepared to consider the possibility that the standards of its academic staff might on occasion be deficient. I suggested that for the future it would be helpful if the Appeals Procedure were amended to enable disgruntled students, in the first instance, to put their concerns about the inaccuracy of factual comments in relation to the marking of assignments directly to the assessor concerned.
I received a response, not from the Vice Chancellor, but from DMU's "Associate Director of Communications". He informed me that:
"We take customer service very seriously at DMU, and have passed [your email] to the appropriate colleagues and will provide a more considered response in due course … it's important for us to investigate and consider your questions very carefully."
Far from getting a considered response from "appropriate colleagues" to my "questions" I got another letter from the SACO, ten months after DMU initially promised to look into my complaint, asserting that I could not use the Student Complaints Procedure to seek reconsideration of the decision to dismiss my appeal. The Appeals Procedure, however, only disallowed this when the decision to dismiss an appeal was made by the SACO, not as in my case, when made by the Assistant SACO.
Moreover, my student complaint was not merely seeking a reconsideration of the decision to dismiss my appeal. My complaint also raised several important questions about DMU's procedures including the lack of a "published date", the crucial omission from the Appeal Form which drastically limited the scope of appeal and the ambiguity in the grounds of appeal; whether the two sentences were to be read as linked by the word "and", "or" or "because". I also complained about the decision to dismiss being wrongly made by someone other than the sole person empowered to do so under the procedure. It can only be concluded from DMU's unwillingness to address the defects in its Appeal Form and Appeals Procedure that they are deliberate attempts to unfairly reduce the number of appeals.
None of the promises made by DMU in its procedures were fulfilled. Furthermore, the local manager, who promised to look into my complaint as soon as possible, did nothing beyond making that empty promise.
The Vice Chancellor who committed DMU to "always strive to offer the best student experience" did nothing to achieve that; on the contrary his failure to act resulted in my suffering a miserable and costly student experience.
DMU's Marketing and Recruitment Assistant who invited me to contact her, ignored me when I did not have anything positive to say about DMU. It shows that DMU is keen to bask in the reflected glory of its successful students, but is not concerned about complying with its own stated standards.
The Associate Director of Communications' assertion that DMU "take customer service very seriously" and his promise of an investigation and a considered and very careful response to my questions resulted in my complaint being effectively dismissed by an inappropriate colleague, ten months after DMU promised to consider it as soon as possible, and with no response to any of my questions.
When I sued DMU in the County Court, the District Judge went hopelessly astray. Instead of giving the contractual terms the meaning most favourable to myself as the consumer, as required by law, he read things into the contract which were not there in favour of DMU. Although he found in my favour that DMU had handled my complaint badly and in breach of its procedure, he decided that the appropriate amount of my course fee which DMU should repay to me was nothing. It appears to have been his view therefore that the right to complain under the contract had no value. Had he been looking at the value of the Complaints Procedure based on how it was operated in practice, rather than on how it should have been operated, he would have been right. DMU's non-compliance with its procedure included every aspect thereof and so it did prove to be valueless.
I did not get the required substantive response from the local manager within 21 days or anything to keep me informed of the progress of my complaint.
There was no investigation as required and I was denied my right to have an attempt made by the local manager to resolve all the issues to my satisfaction. I was denied my right to have the local manager's response in writing or at all. The SACO's belated, inappropriate and inadequate response to my complaint was contrary to the Complaints Procedure. Her response was inappropriate because that was the task of the local manager and it denied me my right to appeal to her as the SACO under stage 2 of the procedure and subsequently to the Complaints Committee under stage 3.
By not awarding me any damages or repayment of my course fee for even the contractual non-compliance which the District Judge found, he left me open to being effectively punished by way of costs for DMU's "bad" handling of the matter. Rather than showing any contrition for its failings or doing anything to try and put things right, DMU sought to obtain almost £49,000 from me in respect of its legal costs. I ended up paying £9,000 to DMU, as well as bearing my own costs, meaning that DMU had still wasted £40,000 from what it called "the public purse" in defending my claim when all it had to do was comply with its own procedures. Shame!