{"id":126704,"date":"2021-05-11T09:10:07","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T07:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=126704"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:25:37","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:25:37","slug":"students-with-motivation-issues-are-hardly-receiving-any-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2021\/05\/11\/students-with-motivation-issues-are-hardly-receiving-any-help\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Students with motivation issues are hardly receiving any help\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read and compare the coronavirus updates released by the Executive Board over the last year and the main thing you will notice is how reactive they are. Each time the Prime Minister gives a press conference on restrictions and potential relaxations, students will receive an e-mail the next day in which the university explains that \u2013 \u2018unfortunately, dear student\u2019 \u2013 there is not an awful lot it can do to change the situation. By now the academic year is nearly over, and despite a few half-arsed initiatives having been taken, it is students who bear most of the brunt of remote learning, while EUR keeps telling its students that it is not in a position to do anything about it.<\/p>\n

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Among the series of e-mails sent by the Executive Board, there are some that illustrate rather painfully how little the university has been able to do for its students in the past year. An update announcing that the university would relax its requirements regarding the number of credits to be obtained by first-year students by 10 to 15 per cent (there was no explanation in the e-mail as to how they arrived at those figures) came with another message, which was that students were still performing well, despite all the remote teaching. \u201cThe results of the exams administered between September and December show that, generally speaking, you are performing well \u2013 as well as in previous years.\u201d This is a rather worrisome sign that what matters most to EUR is not student well-being, but rather high exam pass rates. Or perhaps it is a sign that EUR considers these two things to be synonymous, which is worrying in its own right.<\/p>\n

In an e-mail sent in mid-January, the Executive Board reminded us \u2018that we will all have to be flexible\u2019. However, when it came down to it, it was mostly students who were expected to be flexible, while the university hardly came up with any initiatives designed to make studying easier for students. In its communications, EUR seemed to assume that students would go on obtaining credits as usual, as in any other year. The support initiatives established by the university seemed to be established out of a sense of duty rather than out of a genuine wish to help your average student. The student well-being platform Are You OK Out There?<\/em> seeks to support students who are experiencing mental health problems. It is not up to me to state whether or not this method is effective, but what I can say is that it ignores and fails to serve a large group of students. Those students who are not suffering mental health issues, who have so far got through the coronavirus pandemic without suffering depression but do experience severe motivation issues when it comes to their studies, are hardly being offered any help.<\/p>\n\n\t

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