Alongside equity and trusts, the completion of a dissertation is now being made mandatory – we will only get to choose two modules. 

Students feel incredibly angry about this decision being made without the law school considering how us as students would feel about this decision. We don’t think this decision has been properly thought out in terms of it’s impact on students and staff.

This impacts both law and criminology students.

Ordinarily, when a student writes a dissertation, they will be supervised by a lecturer who will assist them in their work. A dissertation is 12,000 words long and requires a rigorous amount of research and work. It will be a 30 credit module with 100% weighting.

If you consider the ratio of students in our year to the number of lecturers that means there will be about 20 students per lecturer, on top of all of the other work lecturers have to do, such as lecturing and taking seminars in core modules, grading coursework etc. This puts an incredible amount of pressure on staff.

It should also be considered that our final year modules are the most fundamental, as they are the grades that will add up and total our final grade for our degree. Therefore, if we are tasked with writing a 12,000 word dissertation, on top of three other modules, and we don’t get the best grade – it will have a knock on effect in how we perform overall in our degree. 

We also feel that it is very unfair for them to spin such significant change on us so close to us choosing what our modules will be for next year. The vast majority of students considered what they were going to choose for their third-year modules either when they were applying for universities, or very early into their first year. If we had been aware that they would make a dissertation mandatory, many students would not have chosen this university. This would likely be a huge deterrent for future applicants when the website and policies are updated too.

We think the reasoning of cutting costs is equally preposterous given the fact that tuition fees are increasing, and they already accept a large volume of students into the university per year.

We think we need to try and do something about this. Something like a dissertation really should be optional as opposed to mandatory, for the benefit of both students and staff. Not everyone is cut out to write a dissertation, or has had their heart set on a certain three modules that would be crucial within their future career path. This decision has been made without asking students, and is incredibly unfair.

As far as we're aware from the research we have carried out, no other LLB Law courses at any other university in the UK makes a dissertation mandatory. Not even Russell group universities. So why should we have to?

The quicker we take action, the more likely it is that something can be done.