I decided to stay at the university at which I had taken the CPE because I had been so overwhelmingly impressed by the standard and quality of the teaching I had received. I was truly dismayed by the dismal experience of the BVC: the only good point was the wonderful opportunity I had to work in the university law office for my option subject. The lecturers were generally ignorant about legal practice, were embarassingly bad at law in general and were unfit to be teaching postgraduates preparing to look for pupillage in a hostile environment. I simply could not believe that this was coming from the law school that had taught me so wonderfully previously (and did so again subsequently).

It also seemed to me utterly incredible that this institution could remain accredited despite its dismal teaching and completely unqualified staff. What is the Bar Council doing?

I might be a bit slow at the end of a rather difficult week, but I see no contradiction between my words that you quote and what you say about an appeals process.

However, I would add that appeals processes in universities that I have come across or heard about are pretty variable in terms of level, efficiency and implementation.

I have no in depth knowledge of law school appeals provision, but clearly Cardiff’s appeal process was either inadequate structurally or in implementation. In addition, I know of no university appeals process that would encompass an appeal of the structure and operation of the exam board itself, which was the main issue in the JR. Of course, I stand to be corrected.

On the ‘not uncommon’point, I have on a few occasions chaired exam boards where I have, rather pointedly, had to ask a tutor to leave while we discussed a problematic something in which they had been involved. This clearly came as a surprise to some and didn’t go down well. I recall one individual protesting that he should be there to say what happened, regardless of the fact that both the student’s account and his account were written down and available to the rest of us. I did actually suggest to him that we should also hear the student in that case, which resolved the problem. (I’m not holding myself out as a paragon here, it was just a basic issue of fairness, which apparently eluded Cardiff BVC.)

I have also on a number of occasions seen tutors who marked work, which then received marks from internal and external moderation which strongly diverged from their own, quite happily insist on their grade being awarded when acting as a member of the exam board and in the absence of the external.

For clarity, none of this was in a law school and happened across four different institutions in the 1990s and early 2000s.

So yes, I would say it is not uncommon or at least was not in the recent past.

When I applied to study for my undergraduate law degree,of all my choices, Cardiff was the ONLY university that made me sit a written test of english ( I have two grade A O Levels in the subject, obtained at the tender age of TWELVE.),AND attend an interview. I was actively dissuaded from attendance at the faculty open day because it would be ‘boring and embarassing’. For who, I wonder?
I applied to the London School of Economics the same year, and was offered a place without ANY of the above nonsense.
Speaks EONS for Wales’ only RG university, no?-

“…it is not unusual to see a bunch of lecturers make a bad decision, then fanny about trying to resolve the resulting mess, or at least make it go away. It is also not unusual to see lecturers convinced that they could not be capable of a less than wholly objective view and so finding no improperness or conflict of interest in sitting in judgment over their own actions.”

A small point: to the best of my knowledge, I have never come across an academic law school that has a wholly internal appeals procedure. It should be the standard that student appeals or complaints of this nature are handled at university level, and certainly the people against whom something is alleged should have no role to play.

As you may note, I had suggested that lecturers of a lawyerly bent would indeed be expected to have a better grasp of ‘natural justice’ etc. than, for example, an art school. I am delighted that this is indeed the case, as your shining probity shows ;-)

It must be better than the old days before anonymity, which I’m happy to hide behind now, but which, I guess, was not available to Ms Clarke’s summative video assessment.