You will find below a guidance on what the MAB means for us. If you have any queries, please contact your rep. In addition, there will be weekly MAB drop-in support sessions in SQX112 every Wednesday 12-1 and online at the same time: Click here to join the meeting.  

• If you don’t know what the MAB involves, come to a support session, ask your rep or a branch officer, or Click here for the marking and assessment boycott FAQs. You can also download this as a guide in PDF format.
• If you do not participate in the boycott (perhaps because you are concerned about the cost of punitive deductions, or the impact on students), that is your prerogative.  But any deductions might not last as long as you think (see below), the university has guaranteed students’ grades and graduations anyway, anyone boycotting will not have to do marking later, and if you do not join the boycott you will be expected to pick up the marking of everyone who is boycotting and do it in less than 20 working days.  Do you want that extra work and stress, dealing with assessments and subjects you know nothing about? If you do, still consider donating to the local hardship fund.
• If you do your marking and do not participate in the boycott BUT you are unwilling or unable to do someone else’s marking when asked to do so, you will still have your pay docked from that point of refusal. You might as well join in the boycott anyway.
• So, if you are asked to do someone else’s marking – tell your rep, and do not do it.  Branch officers will demand total transparency from management about who is being asked to do what.
• If your rep contacts you to confirm you are boycotting – let them know any details that will help them support you.
• If anyone else asks you to inform them in advance about whether you will be taking part in strike action or action short of a strike – you do not have to do this!
• If you want to help organise the MAB and support your colleagues, join the branch’s MAB Team by contacting the Branch Chair (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).
• If you don’t have any marking to boycott, but want to support the huge sacrifice some colleagues will be making, please donate whatever you can to the branch hardship fund. Bank: Unity Trust; Account Name: Northumbria Univ NE 119; Account number: 20295578; Sort code: 60 83 01.
• If you need to claim from the local fund, you can and should (especially if you are hourly-paid) – contact your rep.  You should also access UCU’s national fund: https://my.ucu.org.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/429/~/ucu-fighting-fund-2022
• If you do not do the marking during the boycott, you will not have to do the marking after it (you do not work for free!).  The university has confirmed this and committed to students that they will graduate or receive a grade from exam boards anyway, relying on other people doing the marking, or on “alternative” systems to determine grades.  In turn this means you will not be deducted pay after the boycott ends or after exam boards. This means the amount deducted will be less than you might think. It also means other people who do not boycott will have a lot of extra work to do – encourage them to join UCU, and join the boycott!
• Professor Lawson’s message (19/4/23) said that if you participate in the MAB senior managers have decided they “will withhold pay from the date marks are due but are not submitted” until the end of the “assessment period” (your exam board; note this may be different for L7/PGR work), if you submit notification of your participation “on the first date on which marking and other activities associated with assessment are not undertaken as they normally would be”.  There will be many reasons why you do not ‘normally’ start marking on the day work is submitted (student extensions, research, illness, other duties). So, if you are planning to use the university’s notification system – remember, you have 20 working days to mark work, and the “first date” is not necessarily the start of the assessment period. Instead, this means the crucial timepoint is fixed by the deadline for marking (e.g., the end of the standard 20 working day marking window or the exam board deadline).
• As discussed at the recent branch meeting, if you opt to notify the university this way, you are therefore advised to estimate the amount of time a piece of marking would take based on standard tariffs (see below; also consider what you have been given locally for marking per assessment per student per 20 credit module in your workload – this may be as little as 40 minutes per module, divided into several assessments of 20 minutes) and work backwards to determine at which date notification of participation should be made. This would be the date you would complete the online notification (if you are willing to – alternatively you could simply inform your line manager). For example: if you have 20 scripts to mark which take 30 minutes each, then it is expected to take you 1.35 working days (working @ 7.4 hours/day).  Hence you would only need to give ~1.5 days’ notice that you're not marking. So, if a 20-day marking deadline was not due to expire until 2nd June you should notify that you are participating in the MAB around mid-day on 31st May.  If your exam board was on 9 June, this would also mean any 50% deductions would last for about a week (and you can claim from funds to compensate).
• This means there may be very little time between when the boycotted marks are due and the exam boards.  This means deductions might be more manageable than you think.
• If you do nothing, and do not notify the university, this makes it much harder for the university to mitigate the boycott.  However, be aware the university has said it might “withhold pay retrospectively where participation has not been notified at the time but becomes clear at a later date”. 
• If you are an external examiner, UCU’s MAB guidance tells you the questions to ask to check about the quality of assessment processes: https://www.ucu.org.uk/MAboycottFAQs. If you know your external examiner here, ask them to confirm they will perform the same checks with work at Northumbria.
• If you are paid through external funding (eg. RCUK funding) you should tell your funder that Northumbria is planning to deduct your pay by 50%.  This matters, if, say, 25% of your time is paid from external sources.
• If you feel stressed by the situation – tell your rep, and remember you can self-certify as sick for up to 7 calendar days in a row.  If you’re sick you can’t mark – or boycott marking, or be deducted pay for boycotting – anyway.
• If you feel isolated now or ever – remember, speak to your rep, come to the support sessions online or in person.  Your branch will be organising social and fundraising events to help everyone.  Remember too, that our employers are taking punitive action precisely because they are afraid that action will work when we stand together. Standing together in solidarity – with each other and with students – is a fundamental principle of trade unionism and this is a significant action that will scale with great effect both across our institution and 145 Universities’ nationally and so we should resolve to force UCEA to improve their offer.

Assessment Workload Tariffs – subject to local variation

 

Assessment type	Tariff
Optical Character Recognition assessment (MCQ etc)	10 mins
Assignment/examination – band1	30 mins
Assignment/examination – band2	45 mins
Assignment/examination – band3	60 mins
Assignment/examination – band4	90 mins
Assignment/examination – band5	120 mins
Assignment/examination – band5	To be determined locally
Undergraduate Dissertation/Project	To be determined locally
Postgraduate Dissertation/Project	To be determined locally
PhD viva	6 hours per student
PhD thesis	25 hours per student
Moderation	10% of marking allowance, applied where appropriate