University of Northumbria at Newcastle

This university sadly lacks organisation and fails to pay close attention to its students. Studying here for 4 years I have noticed the lack of support from staff when it comes down to PEC issues and clarity on assignment briefs. Sometimes you feel that the lecturers prioritise their own personal academic research over their students on undergraduate courses. The environmental science course that I study is badly organised and the work load is not proportional, with the majority of assignments (worth half of your whole degree mark) having deadlines all in the same week. Shockingly lectures and dissertation supervisors go on annual leave, do not tell their students, and return the day before major deadlines and are uncontactable via email as they refuse to answer them or ‘fail to see them’. The majority of lecturers use the same material from previous years in their presentations, often failing to change dates on slides or update material. Lectures tend to be very informal, irrelevant to assignment briefs and not very interesting. It always amazes me why lectures are surprised at low attendance in their classes and how this reflects in low averages interms of assignment marks, when they fail to make course topics interesting or relevant. Feedback on assignments is usually unhelpful, assignments are usually handed back to students well after the university’s 20 day policy which is a shame as it restricts students awareness of their works quality and limits time to improve, especially for modules that have 3/4 assignments in close proximity of each other. Work is supposed to be marked anonymously but often isn’t and despite trying to do everything to meet the 70% and above grade criteria, th for university seems reluctant to give th we grades to it’s pupil, despite many feeling like they have achieved this.

The campus at Northumbria is fairly easy to navigate, and a lot of the staff are friendly and welcoming. However, I currently studying the Legal Practice LLM and the teaching is not what I thought it would be. In a few subjects, the teaching has been very good, but in a couple of others it has been difficult to gauge our level of knowledge. In criminal litigation, tne teacher didn't teach a workshop one week, warning us in advance that he wouldn't be there and telling us to do the tasks on our own. Our group emailed him work, as did other students, but we were given no feedback on this so didn't know whether our answers were good. This is unacceptable on a professional course. We also had mock exams in all subjects. In every subject, the exams were available to sit in our own time apart from criminal litigation, which was made available late (while we had other real exams to sit that were a priority). There was then a technical difficulty with the exam and again it was even later that we had access to it. The marking of the exam and mock interviewing in criminal litigation took far too long, and gave us no chance to address our feedback and chat to lecturers. For our mock interviewing, we were told the feedback would be available (2 weeks after other subject feedback had been made available) on the last day we were due to attend university. A lot of people were leaving the city. Instead, it was made available 2 days later, which meant there was no time to talk through why many of us had not passed the interviewing mock competently. I had to teach myself the whole module over Christmas, to the detriment of my other subjects. Furthermore, in my real interviewing exam, I sat in the room it was due to take place, and could hear the lecturer who had cancelled the workshop outside the room, talking to the actors who we would interview. He was telling them how boring it was to mark all the interviewing exams! This was just before I started the exam, and was highly unprofessional, especially for a lecturer who is also a criminal barrister. It was off-putting and other people may have been affected by that comment right before the exam. Through my own effort I passed all my exams, but if I had known how incompetent and unprofessional some of the teaching staff would be, I would certainly not have enrolled at Northumbria.