When I was studying for exams in Trinity 2024, I broke my glasses. I needed an entire new frame and lenses, and my current prescription was about to expire, so I realised I could save money by getting a new eye exam first. I was unprepared for the result, though: I had a detached retina and needed surgery urgently or I could go blind in my right eye at any minute. Since NHS waiting lists were too long, I had to return to the U.S. to get treatment, which caused me to miss my exams. As Oxford could not offer me summer re-sits, I had to take them in Trinity 2025. This forced me to postpone an excellent PhD offer.Â
My plan was to tutor for a year while continually reviewing the material so I would be prepared to ace my exams when I returned to Oxford. This was a good plan… until the night of 7th January, when wildfires ravaged Los Angeles. While I survived the Eaton Fire, my house was one of thousands that burned down. Needless to say, my life was thrown into turmoil, and it was months before I was truly able to get back into a studying routine. I managed to eke out a Pass in June and even get a Merit on two exams, but it was rough.
Moral of the story: we need summer re-sits.
Currently, Oxford offers summer resits for Prelims students – but no such provision exists for the following years. The reasons for this might seem to make sense; it maintains high expectations for students and disincentivises failure. Plus, it reduces the workload of administering exams. The system already grants departmental Boards of Examiners flexibility to consider a student’s extenuating circumstances. Namely, in fringe cases, if a student does well on most exams but fails one because they were ill that day, then the examiners might decide to disregard the exam they failed.
However, when extenuating circumstances cause a student to miss too many exams or perform too poorly, the examiners’ hands are tied – they might decide to remove the cap on the students’ re-sits for the next year, but that still forces the student to wait a year to progress. For example, when my detached retina caused me to miss all my exams, there was simply nothing to go off of. A year later, the stress of having one chance to take six exams despite how overwhelmed I felt was more than I could handle, since I was scared that if I failed too many I’d have to postpone my PhD offer by another year or even lose it entirely. The anxiety of the situation would have been greatly reduced if I’d known that I could re-sit the exams later that summer if needed.
To prevent students from finding themselves in these situations, Oxford should guarantee summer re-sits for anyone unable to progress due to their exams being affected by serious extenuating circumstances. Furthermore, different students might have different timing needs – for example, a student entering a PhD/DPhil programme might need the re-sit sooner, such as early or mid-August, while a student dealing with a longer-term crisis might need the exams later. To handle this, Oxford should give individual departments flexibility to decide on timing in consultation with affected students. I understand Oxford might wish to disincentivise failure and minimise its workload by not offering summer re-sits to everyone who fails, but offering them to those prevented from passing by external hardships is simply the just thing to do.
For Prelims courses, both Trinity exams and re-sit exams are set and checked at the beginning of the academic year. This could be done for Part A through C courses as well. Furthermore, if Oxford decides to make re-sit exams only available for students with extenuating circumstances, then if a certain re-sit exam isn’t needed, they could just not release it and use it next year, which would reduce faculty and staff workload. If serious extenuating circumstances really are so rare, then the burden of marking re-sit scripts will also be minimal. On the other hand, if they’re not so rare, then that only strengthens the case for offering them, as this policy would be negatively impacting a large number of students. Oxford’s lack of summer re-sits puts it in a minority among universities in the UK – that must change.
I don’t hold this against the department and I am grateful for the support of my advisors and lecturers. However, while my experiences are hopefully among the worst, other students have also been affected by this. I knew someone who lost their PhD program offer after also missing exams in 2024 due to illness. Furthermore, as Cambridge Student Union president Sarah Anderson points out, a lack of re-sits particularly affects disabled students at risk of having their exam performance derailed by a poorly timed flare-up.
The current system is both unfair and unnecessary, it’s time to change it for the better. Oxford is already deliberating on this issue at the University level and engaging in dialogue with individual departments. Let’s hope they will do the right thing.
