Cambridge students: stop publicly announcing grades

Students in Cambridge want their grades to become more protected. At the moment, the university sends them their grades personally, and publishes them on a big noticeboard outside the building. According to the initiators of the petition, the people behind the action group ‘Our grade, our choice’, this practice can cause psychological effects like lower self-esteem and anxiety.In the petition, the students give some reasons for their protest, like ‘[this] promotes a culture of grade shaming’ and ‘students may wish to simply have some privacy, which is something that should be a right’. Right now, the petition has 1074 supporters. Another reason is that some students might not want to be addressed to under their own name, particularly people in the trans gender community. If people go by an other name than is in their passport, the university will still use their ‘official’ name. For people trying to change their gender, this can be painful.

 A 23-year-old student tells the Guardian: “People take photos of the grades and post them all across social media and tag people in them – this is the epitome of grade shaming, irrelevant of the actual marks that somebody received and their thoughts on them.” In the past, the university published the grades first, before sending them to students. This has changed in 2010. A university spokesman told the paper: “This is an age-old tradition. If any student feels uncomfortable and wants their name to not be published they can ask their senior tutor for exemption.”