Arday’s students think Cambridge failed them. Now they want their grades reviewed

Cambridge University could be forced to review the grades given to students of Jason Arday after graduates unhappy with their results said they were considering legal action.

A number of Mr Arday’s former students have complained that they received lower grades than expected after “inadequate” supervision by the professor. In one case, a student who asked to change supervisor was accused of being racist.

Separately, Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, is facing demands to refund the tuition fees of students who were taught by Mr Arday after they were “deceived about the nature of their education”.

A mass refund or large-scale retrospective grade changes would be unprecedented in the university’s 800-year history.

Prof Prentice is also facing criticism for failing to grip the crisis engulfing the university, which has damaged its reputation on the international stage. The academics have accused the £507,000-a-year leader of the university of “inaction”, having made no public comments since The Telegraph first reported on the plagiarism row around Mr Arday a fortnight ago. He has now resigned.

It has also emerged that when Cambridge was sent fresh evidence of Mr Arday’s alleged plagiarism last year – having first been alerted to it in 2023 – the “responsible person” allocated to the case was Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of Mr Arday’s faculty who had told him he was “the best in the world” when he was hired.

On Friday, Cambridge announced that it would be reviewing the process by which it appoints senior staff, in what is being seen by some academics as an attempt to head off an independent inquiry.

Cambridge is facing a rebellion from its own academics, who have demanded in a letter to Prof Prentice that there must be “a thorough and transparent investigation into the wider circumstances of this damaging episode”.

Former Cambridge students who contacted The Telegraph complained that Mr Arday gave them minimal supervision, telling some they did not need supervision because they were so outstanding, only for them to get lower grades than predicted. One student who asked to be allocated another supervisor was accused of racism (though there is no suggestion Mr Arday made the accusation).

Now, ex-students have said they are considering appealing to Cambridge to review their grades, including one case where a student appealed their grade at the time but had their appeal rejected.

One former student said the “right and moral thing to do” would be for the university to reopen their appeal.

Daniel Sokol, a barrister at Alpha Academic Appeals and a former university lecturer, said that if students wanted to challenge their grades, the normal course of action would be to ask their university to reopen their case.

If that failed, they could lodge a complaint with the Office of the Independent Adjudicator – the higher education ombudsman – and if that too failed, they could issue legal proceedings against either the university or the ombudsman.

He said: “In a university appeal, their chances of success would partly rest on how much their overall grade depended on supervision from the person they were complaining about. There needs to be a causative link between the university’s breach and the poor academic outcome.

“They might also argue that Cambridge had failed in its duty to provide a reasonable standard of supervision if they thought they could prove that their supervisor was not suitably qualified to assist them academically or did not provide the required level of support.”

Suella Braverman, the education spokesman for Reform UK, has written to Prof Prentice asking whether Cambridge will pay compensation to students who were taught by Mr Arday, as would be expected “in any other case of mis-selling”.

She wrote: “The decision to hire Arday has led to students in your charge being deceived about the nature of their education.

“Will there be any financial redress for students who took Arday’s classes and were deceived?”

She added that the lack of scrutiny of Mr Arday’s career and work by university leaders “raises serious questions over why he was hired and allowed to teach in the first place. Students who were taught by Arday appear to have been taught, and charged money for, a course that he was unqualified to lead and have, in effect, been the victims of fraud”.

Mrs Braverman also wrote to Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, warning that the Government could not allow universities to be “taken over by a culture of fear and progressive dogma” and called on the Office for Students to “intervene in such blatant cases of two-tier hiring”.

There has also been criticism of Prof Cremin, the head of the faculty of education, who was gushing in her praise of Mr Arday when he was hired.

Last year, when Cambridge was confronted with evidence of Mr Arday’s plagiarism by academics and Jack Grove, a Times Higher Education reporter, Cambridge asked Prof Manuel Eisner, its professor of criminology, to investigate, and under its standard procedure its “responsible person” was Prof Cremin.

In an interview last year, Prof Cremin said the British education system should drop its “obsession with grades” as they exacerbated inequality.

In a video interview with the Educational Collaborative for International Schools she said: “I think we need to move away from the idea of high-stakes testing – the idea of an A* at 18, which will be a gateway into what you do next, but which is a completely arbitrary thing.

“It doesn’t signal intelligence or potential, trust me – I meet these young people in Cambridge. It’s simply a marker of schooling. And, as I was saying earlier, you can buy that. So it’s ultimately a marker of wealth.”

She added: “We all know this, but education exacerbates inequality – it doesn’t reduce it... our obsession with grades and our inability to really teach young people to be critical thinkers and to move outside the norm is creating generations where there are huge wellbeing risks.”

Cambridge University was approached for comment.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]