Six UT rules you might not know about

You might be used to getting practice exams and past tests from your study association, as outlined in the column by Niels ter Meer. However, according to the rules of the Education and Examination Regulations (EER), your teacher should be providing those to you. As a student you have the right to inspect model test questions, like similar tests, past tests, or tutorial assignments, if those are representative of the actual tests. Not only the questions should be available, but also their answers and the norm of assessment, so you can check how well you’re prepared for your test.

According to the UT House Rules you are technically not allowed to make any audio or video on campus without permission from the UT’s Marketing & Communications department. So that Instagram story you posted or the recording you made to make notes of your interview might be against the rules. If your recording stays private, you’re not likely to get in trouble for it. But in case you’d rather be safe than sorry, you can ask permission by emailing to [email protected] before making that TikTok or sending that voice message.

Have you ever been waiting for ages for a grade? According to the rules, your grades should be published within ten working days after the test date. For oral exams, you should even receive your results the next working day after your exam. Should your teacher not be able to follow this, they are required to discuss this with the examination board and inform you of a new deadline for when the grades will be available. Do you have a resit coming up? Then the grades need to be published at least five working days before your resit.

According to the Student Charter, the regulations in the Dutch law for working conditions (‘Arbowet’) do not only apply to employees, but also partially to students. These rules specify certain ways in which the UT should protect its students from dangerous working environment. For example, they’re obliged to take measures against physical and emotional strain, like too much work pressure. However, they also have rules for what you should do to prevent dangerous situations, for example by reporting accidents and handling waste correctly. Unfortunately, the webpage outlining these rules – which is linked in the Student Charter – is (at the time of writing) only accessible by employees.

You have the right to review all your tests with your examiner and have your grade explained. Even if you passed a test or assignment, you still should receive feedback and get the chance to talk about it. You can request this by contacting your examiner within ten working days of the publication of the result. Even if a group discussion is organized, but you cannot attend it, you can still request an individual session up to one working day after the group discussion took place. Did you not manage to make use of this opportunity for one of your past exams? You still have the right to inspect it up to two years (!) after the test date.

If you’re on university grounds or in a UT building, you’re not allowed to act ‘contrary to the unwritten rules of social convention’. What those rules exactly are is, obviously, not written down, but breaking these rules can result in being denied access to campus or being de-enrolled as a student.

Navigating these regulations
Want to try to navigate these rules yourself, to look at some of the more specific rules for your situation? The best place to start is the Student Charter, which links to most of the other available resources. For program-specific rules, you should be able to find the Education and Examination Regulations for your programme on your programme page. If you cannot manage to get there through the complicated navigation of the UT website, it’s best to just google for it.