Lowering the BSA requirement to 40 or 35 ECTS won’t help

Op-ed: Lowering the BSA requirement to 40 or 35 ECTS won’t help

Due to the corona pandemic, universities are easing up the BSA requirements by 10 to 15 percent, and they’ll be lenient in special cases. That all sounds nice, says associate professor Willem Jongman, but it isn’t, because it’s not feasible at all.
By Willem Jongman
18 January om 16:42 uur.
Laatst gewijzigd op 19 January 2021
om 9:35 uur.
January 18 at 16:42 PM.
Last modified on January 19, 2021
at 9:35 AM.

Unlike many students, I’ve always been a staunch supporter of the binding study advice (BSA): it motivated students to work hard and forced students who couldn’t cut it to face reality in time.

The effect was reflected in the students’ marks. But everything changed when the Covid-19 pandemic started a year ago. To make it easier on students, the BSA was cancelled last year, but this year, universities refuse to do so, even though online education is still ongoing. Universities claim that students are performing just as well as in previous years, but staff know better; students are very stressed out.

Universities have now agreed to lower the BSA requirement by 10 to 15 percent, and to be lenient in special cases. It sounds nice, but it isn’t. The new requirement would be 35 or even 40 ECTS, and that’s not enough to actually make a difference.

I held a seat on my faculty’s BSA committee for years, and our minimum was 30 ECTS. Perhaps a 30 ECTS lower limit would be smart in this case, too. On top of that, a generous leniency policy is difficult to maintain in practice; it will often be arbitrary.

A leniency policy could lead to hundreds of students applying for leniency. How will faculties deal with that?

We handled a few dozen cases of students in special circumstances a year. They usually qualified leniency. But it was custom work and always took a lot of time. Students had to have all the proper paperwork and study advisers had to issue tailor-made recommendations. We would discuss each case extensively and some students were allowed to state their case in front of the committee in person.

A leniency policy could lead to hundreds of students applying. How are faculties supposed to deal with that?? What will they base their decisions on and what paperwork will they require?

Instead of a leniency policy, which will be hard to implement, I argue that they should lower the BSA requirement to 30 ECTS, or to give students two years to earn 45 ECTS. This would allow them to show what they’ve got come September, once we’re back to administering on-site exams.

I’m worried that this is policy is more of a political compromise and that no one really thought about how to implement it.

Willem Jongman is an economic historian and held a seat on his department’s exam committee and a seat on the Faculty of Arts’ BSA committee for years.

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