Deferral fee allows U of A to profit from student misery

Scott Fenwick
Gateway Staff

Feb 01, 2012

When you’re severely sick or have a close family member die, these are the moments when you just want to stay home and curl-up in a ball. But if this happens during final exams, for most faculties at the University of Alberta, it’s an excuse to charge you $48.70.

The university currently charges that fee for each deferred exam, meaning that if a full-time student missed five final exams because of illness or a family member’s death they would have to pay $243.50 to make it up. Not only does this fee add insult to injury, but it’s possibly one of the most unethical fees the university charges.

Under the university’s academic calendar, students may apply for a deferred final exam if an “incapacitating illness, severe domestic affliction or other compelling reason” keeps them from writing the original one.

This could mean anything from getting sick with Swine Flu, to getting in a car accident or having a family member die. But under the university’s Reasonable Accommodation Policy, the only circumstances where fees are normally waived are where the original final was missed because of religious reasons or a long-term illness.

The current idea of removing this fee was raised last October in the Academic Standards Committee of General Faculties Council, the university’s second-highest legislative body. One of the main defences supporting the fee was that it acts as a deterrent. According to a committee document, there was a concern that waiving the fee would increase exam deferral requests, thereby raising faculties’ expenses.

But there are two problems with this. First, if an exam deferral is being granted to a student in the first place, it’s usually because there’s a legitimate reason. It’s therefore not clear what exactly needs to be deterred. In nearly all circumstances, students writing deferred exams are getting penalized for things beyond their own control.

If anything, the current fees deter students from saving their academic record. One of the worst possible scenarios is that this fee makes a student defer fewer finals than they’re eligible for in order to soften the financial blow.

For example, if something kept a student from writing five finals, he or she may choose to defer only three of them, and then take a severely reduced mark in the other two.

The second problem with the “deterrence” defence is that deferred exam fees don’t go directly to the faculty. Rather, they go directly into the university’s general operating budget. It’s not immediately clear exactly what real costs are associated with the deferred exams at all, let alone why they go where they do or if they’ll make it back to the faculties.

Luckily, there are some voices supporting the removal of this unethical fee. The School of Business and the Faculty of Engineering have already stopped charging for deferred exams. Students’ Union Vice-President (Academic) Emerson Csorba, who sits on the Academic Standards Committee, has also already put his opposition on the record.

But this is still early days. Official discussion on dropping the fee started in October and a formal proposal hasn’t been put been put on the table yet because it still needs the backing of the university’s deans.

Given the university’s finances, some of them may do whatever it takes to protect their budget and claw more money.

It will likely take a co-ordinated effort between the SU and undergraduate faculty associations to get the fee eliminated. This issue needs to be put on the desk of every dean, with every student telling them that this fee isn’t acceptable. The U of A has no right to make money off of students’ misery.

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