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What a shitty time to be a kid or a student.
What a shitty time to be anyone, really, but I feel bad for kids in high school and college who are missing out on all kinds of fun life experiences.
And this whole health crisis hit in the middle of the semester in March in the U.S., so you know a lot of college students have been given the short end of the stick lately.
But what have they had to deal with, exactly?
Here’s what students had to say on AskReddit.
1. Good luck to you.
“For those of you taking the exam in a different time zone and hence early in the morning or late at night, or in places with additional challenges (such as power cuts): we realize this situation demands a lot from you, so good luck to you in particular.”
2. Ugh…
“They told us to prepare to leave for 3 weeks but not pack up all our stuff.
We weren’t allowed to come back to campus to get our things, either. they had strangers pack all of our things and store them in a storage facility, unless we wanted to pay market rate to ship all of our belongings home.”
3. Get out.
“They told us we had 24 hours to vacate our dorm room after our last final. My last final was at 3 pm on a Friday the absolute last week of school so I had until Saturday to leave.
I came in from a final thursday morning to find that maintenance had put all of my possessions in a giant bag and dragged it out into the hallway.
This included my desktop computer, TV, and food from the fridge some of which had now spilled all over my stuff.”
4. Money grab.
“For mine, they moved all classes online, so I would say 95% of people went back home. They gave us a deadline to move out once it was clear that we wouldn’t return to regular classes.
The deadline was about 2 weeks. Then, we get an email that said we would have to be out by the end of the weekend (around 4-5 days to move). It was super shady and inconvenient, as I live fairly close but the majority of people in the dorms live a 4+-hour drive away.
They also sent an email a few days ago that basically said “even though you can’t come on campus or use any on-campus resources, you still have to pay for the privilege to use them, as we can’t drop the charges” so now I’m paying even more for summer classes that are ONLINE ONLY, so I wouldn’t even use anything on campus…
Universities really are only trying to siphon all your money away.”
5. Wow.
“Hiked tuition for next term of online classes.”
6. Gee, thanks.
“They returned like $30 of tuition because we wouldn’t be able to use the gym.”
7. What’s the use?
“I got a 45% refund for housing/dining, and a $16 refund for the gym. I still have to pay library fees and the like for the summer semester, but it’s all online and we can’t use it anyway.
I’m sure I will have to pay lab fees next fall for my online labs as well even though we won’t have any of the materials or actual lab time.”
8. From Europe.
“This is describing my experience in a Belgian university.
Hey, notice how you’ve been in law school for the past 4 years, where you need to rely heavily on written books in the library for all of your research, as almost nothing is digitalized?
Yeah, we’ve closed the library, your deadlines for big research projects, including your master’s thesis, remain unchanged.
You also need to pass at least 30% of the classes you take in your first year to be allowed to continue, this has always been the case. Considering the less than ideal learning/teaching opportunities this year, a lot of freshman are (rightfully so) worried about their future education.
The university has been very clear that they will not be changing any of these requirements unless the statistics show that a significantly lower amount of people passed. This does not affect me at all, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
If this was really their intent, they would publish last year’s and this year’s statistics after finals are over, but for some reason I can’t shake the feeling they won’t and we’ll just have to take their word for it that there was no significant discrepancy.
I do want to add that my professors have done their absolute best to continue teaching their lessons and I do not hold a grudge against any of them.
I just hold one against the university.”
9. Total shitshow.
“A few weeks after the transition to online became permanent, we got a long letter from the dean of the medical school explaining(with legal boiler-plate text) that we will not get a penny back of our tuition since we’re still going to graduate on time, and they offer recorded lectures.
No med school seems to be giving back tuition, so fuck it. Fine. After reading that email, I did digging to try to get some closure on the issue. That’s when I really started to feel like I was getting fucked-
Our tuition is ~30k per semester, not counting other necessary fees + cost of living etc, etc.
The only lectures we have access to were recorded last year (they aren’t asking professors to lecture remotely). They cancelled all small group/ mandatory teaching sessions. They didnt bother to set something up on zoom.
They instead post the answers and encouraged us to look at the material. [one of the two course directors decided to offer once a week follow ups, out of the kindness of his heart, the other did not]
When this crisis kicked off, we got stern email from and administrator requesting individual students to speak only to the class president (warning of professionalism docking if we reached out individually to administration or course directors) . The president very kindly compiled a list of feedback and requests, such as:
• office hours • review sessions • answers to student submitted questions posted weekly • consideration to altering the way grades were calculated given the massive shift to entirely online learning
All of the requests were denied, save one course (out of 3) switching to weekly quizzes in favor of exams – the other two have the same high stakes exams. A course director also went a step further saying that we could email professors individual questions, but that they were under no obligation to respond in any time-frame.
I didn’t move across the country and ask the federal government for ~90k to watch last years lectures and get to sit on zoom sessions with my entire class as a replacement for 8 person facilitated small groups.”
10. That’s messed up.
“One of the departments accused 90% of students of ‘cheating’ on online quizzes for things such as similar incorrect multiple choice answers.
They were bragging about how good they were at catching people when in reality they just didn’t teach well online and nobody knew what it was supposed to be.”
11. A useless safety net.
“Told us we would have a safety net (no detriment policy) for our grades this year; which means we will get an average for both things done before covid and an average overall, and the highest will count. Which is great, except…
Both the before and the overall average will include our dissertation grade… our dissertation is not due until September and has been hugely affected by corona (almost everyone had to design their experiments on my course). And is a huge chunk of our grade. So that’s a pretty useless safety net.”
12. Pissed off.
“We turned in the first part of a year-long project in last semester, and were supposed to get a corrected version of it back this semester, after which we were supposed to use the corrections to finish the project and turn it in this week.
Instead, the department completely refused to hand back any form of the project – not even a digital copy – and kept the deadline the same.
This is despite the fact that my university has opened its doors again to much of the faculty and some of the students, although less than 10% of the student body is on campus at any given time.
What makes it worse is that our library has an ‘order online and pick up’ system in place, meaning with a little communication, it would likely be possible for the department to just drop the crates of corrected projects off at the library, and have the library staff organize them for pick up.
Goes without saying that any complaints from the students who didn’t make a copy of the project, or people like me who lost their copies of it (hardrive died unexpectedly) were not given any slack or sympathy (halfway understandable, but still…). All in all, I guess it’s not the worst thing the uni could have done, but it’s still pissing me off.”
13. No refunds.
“Medical student, we pay a sinful amount of money for Simulation Labs and Virtual Laboratories.
All of it got canceled, shifted to measly grainy 90s potato quality videos followed by MCQ quizzes which feel like Buzzfeed quizzes and the best part,
No refund. At. All.”
14. Where do I start?
“Oof, where do I even start? I think my university did a great job at keeping the dorms and dining halls open and I’m thankful for that but the rest is extremely bad.
-Full tuition and fees even though no events etc. can take place
-Telling international students they could leave before their countries shut down and the stuff in their room will be moved to the lockers for free (now they’ll need to pay 85€ which is a decent price but still..)
-Holding exams online even though the campus wifi is unreliable
-Telling me and some other students (We didn’t have a webcam in our pcs and they’ve been sold out everywhere for a good two months or so) to just buy a laptop despite many students’ bad financial situations
-Not accepting medical notes by the campus psychologists even though the situation puts some students who have mentally struggled before under even more pressure
-Not enforcing the exam period’s 24/7 quiet hours and yet forcing us to take the exams in a quiet environment because the program flags any conversations/music/background noise as cheating
-Last but not least: rejecting a pass option even though almost 40% of the student body signed a petition for it and not even agreeing to discussing other options in the student parliament.”
15. Time to leave.
“Our uni repeatedly told us that they wouldn’t be kicking us out of residence.
Two days later they sent an email late at night giving us four days to move out.”
Now we want to hear from other students out there.
How has this worldwide health crisis affected your education?
Talk to us in the comments!
