Make Something Up

[There is a slight change in the schedule of tonight’s broadcast: this post is not about my current search. Sorry of any inconvenience]

This post is not strictly about me, this is about Riley. But I thought it was infuriating enough that I had to post it.

You may not know this but students are exempt from paying council tax. It works like this, you tell the council you are a student and provide them with proof, job done. The Uni is even kind enough to provide ‘proof of course certificates’ upon request.  Get form. Post Form. Done. Right?

Wrong. Well until this year that is how it worked, and it did work. So abiding by the age old saying of “if it works change it anyway” the system has now changed. The Uni no longer gives out the forms and the surrounding councils have been sent a list of names of all the students. So now the students ring the council and tell them they are a student and in theory the council consults the list, done.

Wrong again. When Riley rang the council they posted her a form to fill in and asked for proof.

Proof = not a problem

Form = problematic

Riley was unable to answer one of the questions on the form, “How many hours do you study”. The reason for this question being so problematic is that a full time student is classed as studying 16+ hours. Now Riley is doing a full time course, but being a 3^rd year and having a dissertation to do, the actual hours she is in lectures is only 6, but each module comes with an allotted amount of ‘self-study’ time, as well as there being a certain amount of hours that you are supposed to spend on your dissertation. All of this means that Riley doesn’t actually know how many hours of study she has a week.

In order to solve this problem she took the form into Uni with her to ask at the office how many hours her course was. This office, the same office that does/did the council tax forms, first of all tells her she doesn’t need to fill out the form and that she just needs to ring the council. After explaining that she had done that, the office then told her that they didn’t know how many hours her course was and that they had never seen that form before.

Maybe the English department office will know how any hours her course is, it is after all the English office and she does do English Lit, they’ll know. That’s what you’d think, but they had no idea, in fact they said:

“Make something up that sounds reasonable”

I find it unbelievable that no one within the Uni knows how many hours study each course has; someone should at least have some sort of idea.  I was once told by a lecturer how many hours I was supposed to be putting into just one module. If I can be told that, surely someone knows how many hours a whole week is, and if they don’t someone should, and the information should be made available to the students, not just for council tax reasons, for actual study reasons (sometimes students require some sort of guide line to help them plan study).

So here we are, a week later and the form is still sitting on the table, waiting to be sent whilst she figures out just how many hours she is supposed to study. Just wait until the council start complaining about the wait…