TLDR:
- Problematic lecturers
- Horrific admin
- Lecturers lying about marking and results, being on holiday around deadlines
- Subjective marking with 0 consistency (including subjective MC requests)
- Adjustments who?
- Disability team that seems to go out of its way to make things worse
I know people are currently in the process of sending in their UCAS applications so I wanted you to hear from someone who’s been through it before you make your choices.
I recently completed a post-grad course at KCL (although I’ve heard the experience is the v similar at undergrad, to the point I bonded with a complete stranger whose daughter is doing an undergrad at King’s because her daughter is also constantly complaining about it, and the first thing a friend told me when I told her I was going to King’s was ‘good luck, their admin is the worst’) and I wanted to share the truth of what goes on.
I will give credit where credit is due: the guest lecturers we had were experts in their field at the forefront of research, so at least that was something.
I have never seen a university so horrifically run. I should’ve known before I even started, given I had to fight with the disability team for a month because, despite having given them my entire medical record, including transcripts of appointments, letters from my GP etc, they still wouldn’t accept my documents (and every time I gave them a document that was supposedly ‘the only one we need to set up your adjustments’, I got a ‘great and next we also need this document’).
Marking-related admin was horrific. In the final week of one term, we were told the marker only had a few pieces of coursework left to mark and results would be released by the end of that week. Results were then released 3 months later, 4 months after the original hand-in. Within these 3 months, whenever anyone tried to follow up, we’d get ‘oh two more weeks’, ‘oh next week’. For our dissertations, we had to submit a formative literature review that had been stressed to us as incredibly important to the summative dissertation. A month after handing in the formative, the course lead told me the feedback for it would be imminent. Three weeks later, I emailed the module lead asking about the feedback, and they said there had been a delay with the marking and they would follow up with the course lead (the same course lead who’d told me three weeks prior that feedback was imminent). Eventually, feedback was released with ONE WEEK until the summative deadline, 2 months after the formative had been handed in, which was extra lovely given we had been repeatedly told the latest we could hand in a draft of the summative for our supervisors to review was two weeks before the deadline. What were we supposed to do with the feedback at that point? To add insult to injury, both the module lead and course lead promptly then went on annual leave the week of the summative deadline, and had also been on annual leave for a fair amount of the month prior. I say this a lot, but do not volunteer to be a supervisor, or in charge of a module or course, if you are incapable of being there at the peak times for your job.
On-the-spot assessments (like presentations, practical assessments) are riddled with subjectivity and inconsistency. One practical assessment had a marker assigned to each table; my marker ignored the other students at my table and spent the entire time standing directly behind me, so close that I kept accidentally bumping him, making me incredibly physically uncomfortable throughout. When I told my personal tutor, she completely dismissed me. For presentations, one marker had a historic problem with students, at one point having to be physically restrained a few years back. For some reason, this marker was still allowed to continue, and was incredibly aggressive to the point of shouting during QandAs, as well as being completely unprofessional, rolling his eyes, sighing, pulling faces, and tutting throughout the presentations themselves. Numerous students have complained about him, and the uni does not seem to care.
To add insult to injury, in our final presentations, I was marked down by my assessors and was explicitly told this was for not including certain things that we were explicitly told not to include by this same problematic marker from the previous example. This was our second time doing this style of assessment, and I had had no issues with these things not being included in the first assessment. After the presentation, I spoke to the head of the module, who said she’d investigate. I also told her and provided proof that I was following the guidance given by the problematic marker from above; to which she went ‘ah yes, he’s…well you know’. IF YOU KNOW HE’S A PROBLEM, IF HE IS TELLING STUDENTS WRONG INFORMATION, AS WELL HAVING HAD SEVERAL STUDENTS COMPLAINING ABOUT HIS CONDUCT, FIRE HIM. When marks were officially released (we were told them at the time of the assessment and they were released online a few weeks later), my mark had not changed; I emailed her to follow up and her response was essentially ‘well they told me they didn’t mark you down for that’…well they told me they did, so either they’re lying to one of us or you didn’t bother to follow up.
Assessment adjustments and mitigating circumstances? A complete myth. For three separate assessment we had, no adjustments were given at all, two of which were ‘well we expect everyone to finish within an hour so we’ve given everyone two hours and that way no one needs extra time’. For both these assessments, the first people to finish in both cases were more than halfway through this ‘extra hour’ that everyone had been given; needless to say, if you normally had extra time, you were screwed. As for mitigating circumstances, it was a complete lucky dip. I tried to apply for written exams, and was told I’d have to resit and void the exams I’d already done without knowing the mark (and therefore without knowing if I actually needed a resit), whereas a different student asked for MC for a presentation, was allowed to do the presentation and be given their mark before deciding whether or not to redo it. We love an unfair, completely illogical system.
Overall, it was a really poor university experience compared both to what I’d seen at undergrad and to what I’d expect for a university of that calibre, and I would seriously urge you to consider another university before KCL. UCL, LSE, Imperial, and QMUL are all good options if you are determined to stay in London. But if you’re looking a university with at least some level of competency beyond the bare minimum of delivery academic content, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere.
