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Indian Grad Sues Oxford Uni After 17 Years for not Getting Top Grades

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 22 2017, @06:03PM   
from the you-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up dept.

An Oxford graduate's failure to get a top degree cost him a lucrative legal career, the High Court has heard.

Faiz Siddiqui alleges "inadequate" teaching on his modern history course resulted in him getting a low upper second degree in June 2000. He blames staff being absent on sabbatical leave and is suing the university for £1m. Oxford denies negligence and causation and says the case is "massively" outside the legal time limit.He said: "Whilst a 2:1 degree from Oxford might rightly seem like a tremendous achievement to most, it fell significantly short of Mr Siddiqui's expectations and was, to him, a huge disappointment."

Mr Mallalieu said his employment history in legal and tax roles was "frankly poor" and he was now unemployed, rather than having a career at the tax bar in England or a major US law firm. Mr Siddiqui also said his clinical depression and insomnia have been significantly exacerbated by his "inexplicable failure". Julian Milford, for Oxford University, told the court Mr Siddiqui complained about insufficient resources, but had only described the teaching as "a little bit dull".

Perhaps he might find employment with "This is Windows calling..."

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Original Submission

• Re:Sigh. (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 24 2017, @11:05AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Friday November 24 2017, @11:05AM (#601013) Journal

  It's been five years since I looked at the study, but I seem to recall that they looked at groups of 5-6. They also, as I recall, differentiated between supervision-style and seminar-style teaching, where the latter often wants larger groups. The problem with larger groups is that you end up needing a more fixed curriculum, whereas a supervision-style arrangement lets you wander off from the syllabus and teach things of greater interest to the students if you have a group that's already confident with the lecture material. The other problem with larger groups is that a dominant individual ends up monopolising the supervision (I saw this in my own undergraduate degree at a non-Oxbridge university where our weekly tutorials ended up being one-on-one lessons for me with a professor, with five spectators hoping that no one asked them a question). With a smaller group, it's much easier for the supervisor to steer the conversation towards the quieter students.

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