Whilst I sympathise with your issue, I feel that you should have made it clear that YOUR course in particular was disorganised and that you feel something needed to be said about it instead of essentially helping to black list the University as a whole. Many talented individuals (before my time and yours) have come out of Anglia Ruskin and it doesn’t seem fair that the University (which already dwells in the shadow of Cambridge University) should be subjected to more bad press when it really does not deserve it.

I’m not saying it should have been swept under the carpet, or that you should have been suspended. But the fact remains that many Students and friends and families of those students felt disheartened and somewhat embaressed by your YouTube video.

I will however contact David Howarth and see if what he has to say is the same as what I’ve written above.

I contacted the Office of fair trading who don’t deal with individual queries but they put me through to Consumer Direct and they were able to give me some useful information. The two choices given to me by consumer direct was to quit the course and get money back from the university for “breach of contract” or to finish the degree and possibly not get any money back as I would have used the full service in the eyes of the law, or if I was really adamant find a way to prove my consequencial loss and go through the small claims court.

Regarless of whether any of this happens I found out that each call is logged so that if they get a large number of complaints about the same organisation or institution and especially same problems experienced by different people that organisation or institution will be externally investigated by Consumer Direct, so what we need to do here is to encourage more people to complain so that organisations and institutions that are falling below the minimum standard get scrutinized from an independent outside organization who have the power to instill change.

Although I will not name names, one of our classmates has suffered a break down partly due to the stress caused by our course issues which I think just goes to prove how stressful it really is to be at the university and in particular the course that we are on. I have made the associate dean of student affairs aware of this as I think they need to know what a negative impact the university is having not just on this individual but on many students.

Through sheer determination and a lot of bitching I have managed to be allowed onto a module called Internet Marketing which should have been an option anyway. What I am unhappy about is the fact that I have to do this module on top of my work load for this semester instead of doing it in the summer when we should be allowed to do extra modules.

They have finally organised two modules to be run in the summer. They are Entrepeneurship and Innovation which is already being run for the MBA students which means we will be joining a class that’s already running and that it’s not run specifically for us, which I don’t particularly have a problem with but the university is acting like they are doing me and the rest of my class a massive favour (offering us what was in the prospectus, how generous!?!?!) The other one is called something like Leadership and Organisation which we have covered in both semester 1 and 2 which means we are not getting value for money.

My feeling is that I should have gone straight into employment and not wasted my money and time doing this course but as I am more than half way through I feel obligated to finish it due to the guilt of wasting the money and to show that I’ve nothing to be ashamed of and I AM going to finish the course!

I’m currently doing a MSc Social Research & Evaluation at the London Metropolitan University, which involves studying complex research methods and evaluation strategies – very tough, even with support. I can understand what you must have been going through – you have my utmost respect.

I suppose that’s what happens when people have to pay for something.

When there were no fees for tuition, people didn’t complain. They got something for free and were grateful.