Universities and Colleges Editing and Proofreading Services

A student has failed a module and has fourteen days to do something about it. The regulations tell them, in a document of eleven thousand words, that they may submit a request for consideration of mitigating circumstances to the relevant board via the prescribed process. What they need to know is whether to write to somebody, by when, what evidence to attach, and what will happen — and that is knowable, and the document does not say it.

We edit what universities and colleges produce — assessment and academic regulations, appeals, complaints and mitigating circumstances procedures, student-facing explanations of regulations, extension and deferral processes, progression and award requirements, fitness to study and support procedures, disciplinary and misconduct procedures, programme and module handbook content, communications about regulation changes, and letters to students about outcomes and decisions. Our editors work on the regulation a student has to use in fourteen days.

The student-facing version of a regulation is where an institution either enables a student to act or protects itself, and its failure is precision without navigability. The regulations must be legally exact and the student needs a route through them, and these are two documents doing two jobs. We work through the second so it opens with the decision the student has to make and the deadline attached to it, since somebody who has just failed a module is not reading for orientation; so each route is described as a sequence — what to submit, to whom, by when, what evidence, what happens next and how long it takes — with the actual number of days rather than a reference to a working-days definition elsewhere; so the outcomes are listed with what each means for the student's progression, given that "the board may exercise its discretion" tells them nothing about whether they will lose the year; so the evidence requirement is stated as documents a student can obtain, because a requirement for independent medical evidence within five days is often impossible and the institution needs to say what it accepts instead; so the point of no return is named, as this is the single most consequential fact and it is usually implicit; so the help available is named with a person or a service and its opening hours; and so the plain version says which regulation it summarises and that the regulation prevails, so the two documents can coexist honestly. Versions written this way reduce appeals, because most appeals are about process rather than outcome.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including regulations, student cases and internal documentation. We are editors rather than academic registrars or legal advisers, and we offer no view on regulations, decisions or students' rights. What we can do is give a student a route through the document they need this fortnight.