Navigating Student Records and Support at King's College London

King's College London (KCL), a globally recognized public research university, offers a multitude of resources and systems to support its diverse student body. Understanding these systems, particularly regarding student records, assessments, and mitigating circumstances, is crucial for a successful academic journey. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of these key aspects of student life at KCL, drawing upon available information to guide students through potential challenges and opportunities.

Assessments and Mitigating Circumstances

As a student in a taught program at King's College London, participation in assessments at specified times is expected. Assessments include handing in coursework assignments and sitting exams. However, KCL recognizes that circumstances beyond a student's control can sometimes hinder their ability to perform their best.

Understanding Mitigating Circumstances

"Mitigating circumstances" refer to unforeseen events that significantly impact a student's ability to complete assessments. These circumstances might include illness or bereavement. KCL offers a formal process for students to request accommodations when such situations arise.

Requesting Mitigating Circumstances

When facing difficulties, the university encourages you to submit a request as soon as possible. You can submit a request at any time before a deadline or exam date. It is important to note that you do not need to wait until you have evidence to submit a request.

Key Information for Your Request

Your statement should explain the mitigating circumstances you are struggling with and how they have affected you. When preparing a mitigating circumstances request, it is important to provide a clear and detailed account of the situation. This includes:

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Explanation of Circumstances: A detailed description of the difficulties you are facing.
Impact on Studies: A clear explanation of how the circumstances have affected your ability to study and complete assessments. It’s helpful to clearly explain how specific symptoms impact specific aspects of study.
Key Dates: Include key dates including when your circumstances started, including any dates of diagnosis if your difficulties are health related.
Specific Symptoms: If the request is based on physical or mental health, explain specific symptoms including the frequency, severity and duration.

Retrospective Applications

If you are applying retrospectively (meaning you have already sat an exam or handed in coursework) then you must also include a section explaining why you did not apply for mitigating circumstances in advance. For example, this could be due to an unexpected onset of difficulties within the assessment itself or not realizing the impact they were having on you at the time.

Evidence Requirements

It should be written evidence in English (or with a certified translation) from a professional, independent third party. The university acknowledges that in exceptional cases, it might be impossible to obtain evidence and in such cases the requirement to submit evidence will be waived.

Deadlines

There are deadlines for you submitting a mitigating circumstance request, and the university also has deadlines for getting back to you promptly. If your deadline has already passed, you can submit a request for mitigating circumstances up to five working days after the date of the assessment. If you have attempted an assessment, but in hindsight believe you had mitigating circumstances, you can also submit a request within five working days. If you have missed the deadline for requesting mitigating circumstances, you might still be able to apply, as long as you have not received ratified results yet. Mitigating circumstances requests will never be accepted after the publication or ratification of results.

Possible Outcomes

There are a few different things that can happen when you submit a mitigating circumstances request. If your request is rejected, you must complete your assessment as planned, unless you can show evidence that your circumstances have changed since the initial request, or if you can produce further evidence that was not available at the time of the initial request.

What if I worry that these might not be accepted?

If you feel you have mitigating circumstances that will affect you in your assessment, you should always submit a request as soon as possible.

What if I did not hear back in time, I chose not to complete my assessment, and now my request has been rejected?

You will most likely receive a mark of zero and will need to re-sit if a re-sit opportunity is available. If you do not have a re-sit opportunity available, you will need to discuss your situation with your department.

What if I did not hear back in time, I chose to complete my assessment, and now my request has been approved?

You should hear back within five working days of submitting your request. You cannot appeal against a decision regarding your request until your module results are published. Only then can you appeal against a decision of the Board of Examiners by submitting a Stage One appeal.

Disability Support and Personalized Assessment Arrangements

KCL is committed to providing an inclusive learning environment for all students. If you are disabled, you can request a Kings Inclusion Plan (KIP) which sets expectations for reasonable adjustments the university will make as standard for your learning.

King's Inclusion Plan (KIP)

In the UK disability is defined as a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day to day activities (Equality Act, 2010). A KIP outlines reasonable adjustments tailored to individual needs.

Personalised Assessment Arrangements (PAA)

If you need additional adjustments for completing graded exams or coursework, you can apply for Personalised Assessment Arrangements (PAA). Most PAA relate to exams, but you can also apply for the ability to request seven-day extensions for coursework. If your PAA request is approved, you will still need to complete a mitigating circumstances form for each assessment, but you would have the option to select the ‘extension granted by PAA’ option in the drop-down menu. This would mean that the mitigating circumstances procedure would be more straight forward for you, as you wouldn't need to provide additional evidence.

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Group Work and Accommodations

When setting group work assignments, the university asks staff to be mindful that occasionally some students may need to defer or apply for an extension. In some circumstances, requests like this may be accepted.

Confidentiality

All information disclosed will be treated sensitively and confidentially.

SITS Cloud Migration

Tribal and King's College London (KCL) have delivered a significant SITS Cloud migration project which ends over two decades of KCL running SITS on premise. This is the first SITS Cloud migration undertaken in the UK, with a further three universities currently migrating and a dozen more holding Cloud Discovery Workshops to assess and scope their transitions.

Addressing Challenges

The challenge KCL faced was providing the most appropriate systems to deliver the best possible experience for its students but a global pandemic was not on the university's risk register… On-premise infrastructure was not able to scale and flex sufficiently with large-scale, fast changes in demand and the SITS Client was not as responsive for the newly home-based workforce as it was on campus. They needed a more connected, agile, resilient, and secure platform that was able to scale and flex for the planned and unplanned.

Benefits of Cloud Migration

With previous success in migrating and managing student information systems in the cloud, Tribal was uniquely positioned to help KCL address these challenges. It has improved performance, it has provided us with resilience, it has improved some of our interfaces, and it has demonstrated that a committed group of people working well together can deliver a major project on one of our most critical systems in a record time. By moving SITS to the cloud and managing it as a service, Tribal own responsibility for the system availability, performance, maintenance, and upgrades meaning KCL staff can focus on deriving increased value from the application. Simple upgrades and guaranteed high levels of system availability and remote working experience means everything is more quickly and easily accessible. It also gives KCL the benefit of the system expanding and developing to fit their needs. Resilience and redundancy are built-in, so that even if servers fail, automatic recovery means end users are rarely affected. There is 24/7 support and 99.9% service availability for non-scheduled outages. KCL experienced a very smooth migration over the course of 6-months. A tremendous Tribal and KCL combined delivery team has enabled easier and faster end-users access and improved SITS performance.

Future Optimizations

Phase two, which has been started, will see the optimisation of all remaining system interfaces and further transformation and functional improvements. With SITS running in the cloud KCL will be able to take advantage of the latest technology in the new modules rolled out on the Edge platform as all their system interfaces will be optimised to connect to Edge.

King's Student App

The King’s Student App is designed to help you navigate student life quickly and easily on the go. Pages in the app provide information and updates about a wide range of services and let you know about opportunities you can get involved in outside the classroom.

App Features

Timetable Access: Need to see your King’s timetable on the go?
Campus Events: Want to hear what’s going on across King’s campuses?
Easy Access to Systems: Looking to access King’s student systems easily through your phone?
Student Life Benefits: Student life benefits that you can take advantage of

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