List of information requested from Newcastle University

(or that I would like to request)

By analogy with the process in a British law court I did have the intention of asking Newcastle Universities various questions, one at a time. Experience has shown that if you start asking them a couple of questions simultaneously, they will either ignore you, or answer the 'easist' question while ignoring the 'harder' questions.

Here is the list of questions I would like to ask - I haven't progressed very far down this list.

Why were certain questions on the third year exam A3/2 identical to questions on the previous-year's second-year exam A2/2 ?
Here is a "reply" received from Newcastle, after 5 years and 5 months, informing me that these questions were "not even remotely identical". It opens in a separate page.

And here is a letter received from Newcastle University, about two months later (5 years and 7 months after I had first posed the question), contradicting the previous letter while simultaneously denying that the questions are identical.

The statements given in the second letter are claptrap, but at least it is something concrete that I can take to a third-party in an attempt to initiate further action (I suppose).

Students were actively discouraged from following this course by statements from one of the lecturers on the course that "last year, students only got about 5% of their marks from the Fluid Mechanics half of the course" and perhaps you might like to move to another course because this course is "very hard". As a result only ten remained out of the original two dozen or so ?. Do you admit that this mass exodus took place, and if so, how do you justify it ?

Question sent beginning of October 1999 - no acceptable reply received so far.

I did receive a non-answer which you can read here, and which which ignores the question completely.

In this letter you can read that they have been extremely cooperative in answering all the various questions (sic) that I have asked in the past.

(And this is in a letter which makes a point of ignoring my second question completely ! !). I did ask them to tell me just two questions of mine that they have answered, but they went into IGNORE mode again. I can't press this particular line too much because it diverts from the main thrust of my grievance, although Newcastle are missing a golden opportunity because I am stating quite categorically that since this is my second question, the maximum number of questions that Newcastle could possibly have answered is one. By producing two questions that they had answered, Newcastle could have shown what a completely idiot I am, and thus killed my case stone-dead.)

It does also state that I have been receiving statements from the Department (of Mathematics). This statement is quite simply not true and that is all there is to it. I have sent many letters to the Mathematics Department but received not one reply - sometimes they get answered by the Academic Registrar. I have been trying to think of an analogous scenario I have encountered somewhere in a story - attempting to communicate with a body but receiving only replies from a totally separate body altogether who knows nothing of the matters involved: I had an idea that it was in a work by Franz Kafka but have been unable to track it down - if anyone knows of the source I am thinking of, please let me know.

Would it be correct to state that although there were 10 questions on the exam paper, everyone did the same 3 questions, and everyone got almost all their marks from these very same three questions ? (Note : I did an enormous amount of work for this unit, at least twice as much as on any other unit, but was unable to answer these 3 questions properly because I came across first-year material which I could not do, by virtue of not being at Newcastle for the first year. As implied in the question, I could not counter this situation just by attempting other questions)

When I originally went to see the Students Union about my problem, the Welfare Officer announced that he knew all about this problem already, and then launched into a description of problems on another course entirely - something that up until then I had been unaware of. From memory, I think this was a Statistics and Operational Research course. Were there many complaints received from students about this particular course ?

Portsmouth University recently lost a point in their QAA, because the marking scheme for project work was not sufficiently clear. Does this leave me grounds to criticise the Numerical Analysis project work at Newcastle, where the marking scheme was not even given. (The upshot of this was that I was told that I had lost a fair share of marks because I had not submitted a decent write-up, when no-one had informed of what form this write-up should take ).

In conjunction with above, I also made an error on the same project work thru misreading the question. Do you think that the question could too easily be misunderstood ? ( What is absolutely certain from viewing my project is that I did misread the question - what I want to know is whether, in the light of the fact that people misread things all the time [ as part of being human ], the question could have been improved in its readability, given that this was important examinable work.) Incidentally, my exam mark was 57% but instead of this being increased due to project work as (you might normally expect), it was dropped to 50% ).

Why exactly was I the only Mathematics student on the Numerical Analysis final-year course ? It seems very strange, particularly in the light of my experience of the Numerical Analysis courses at other Universities. Was no concern expressed by the Mathematics Department that this course was not attracting large numbers of Maths students, or any thought given as to the reason ?

At the end of the second-year, the Applied Maths unit A2/1 was brought forward by two full weeks, at the last moment. And this information wasn't even announced to the class - it was just posted and allowed to percolate thru. Do you think that this is acceptable behavior ?

I had enormous financial difficulties financing myself thru my studies. In fact, it has saddled me with 'lifetime' 5-figure debts, and County Court judgements mean that I can never get a mortgage etc., etc. etc. Yet my personal tutor, O.H. King, never once asked how I was getting along financially, never once enquired about what effect it was having, never once broached the subject (despite the fact that it was fairly obviously having a deleterious effect). What sort of background does King have - does he come from a smug public school background ?

A pertinent technique described by Private Eye

This site created by Brian Daugherty
Email Me