St Lucia students resist UWI Global Campus move back to in-person exams

Students enrolled on distance-learning degrees with the University of the West Indies Global Campus are pushing back against the university's decision to bring back face-to-face end-of-term examinations, arguing that the change does not match the way their courses are actually taught.

As reported by St. Lucia Times, a letter circulated by the students and published by Antigua News Room sets out their case, and a second-year student based in Saint Lucia has described how the switch is affecting learners on the island.

The students point out that their experience differs sharply from that of people attending UWI's bricks-and-mortar campuses. Those students have full-time lecturers, routine tutorials, peer support schemes and straightforward access to academic help. By contrast, the letter says many Global Campus courses offer four live sessions or fewer each semester, with some sessions cramming several units together and others devoted mainly to assignments rather than teaching the course material.

Concerns also include sparse tutorial provision, slow replies to questions and the volume of content students are expected to work through largely on their own. The students argue it is hard to accept being examined in the same way as campus-based peers without receiving the same level of live teaching and exam preparation.

The practical impact falls hardest on working adults and parents, the very people who chose the Global Campus for its flexibility. The Saint Lucian student told St Lucia Times she enrolled believing both classes and end-of-term assessments would stay online, as they had been in her first year, when exams were sat through a proctored browser within a generous window that let her fit study around her job.

That arrangement changed in the 2024/2025 academic year, when students were told exams would instead take place at designated sites. She said the timetable for those visits cuts into paid working hours because of travel and exam time, and that some students end up using sick days to attend. With four exams on four separate days, a single week can be dismantled by the commute alone.

The broader complaint, echoed in the letter, is that students who built their work, family and study schedules around an online model are now being asked to rearrange their lives. A petition asking the university to let those who started under online exams finish that way, while applying the new structure only to new students, was acknowledged, the student said, as a matter of concerns, but the original course structure continued anyway.

The dispute matters locally because the Global Campus, known until 2023 as the Open Campus, is the main way Saint Lucians can work towards a UWI degree without leaving home. Full campus degrees usually mean travelling to Barbados, Jamaica or Trinidad. The island's other principal tertiary institution, the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in Castries, named after the Saint Lucian winner of the 1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, offers associate degrees and diplomas rather than full university programmes.

Most of the people affected are juggling study with jobs, many of them in the tourism sector that drives the economy of Saint Lucia. Hotel and restaurant staff booking holidays to St Lucia for foreign visitors, or handling enquiries about flights to St Lucia, are exactly the kind of employees whose shifts suffer when a exam timetable demands four separate days away from work.

A resolution matters to visitors too, in a less obvious way. The island's tourism workforce relies on upskilling, and the same people advising guests on the best time to visit St Lucia or recommending things to do in St Lucia beyond the Pitons may be studying for degrees at night and on weekends. Rigid exam schedules make that balancing act harder, potentially slowing the development of skills the industry needs.

The students' position is not that exams should never be in person, but that the university should either provide comparable teaching or let continuing students complete their degrees under the model they signed up to. They have asked UWI to acknowledge the gap between the two study modes before holding everyone to the same standard.

For now, the university has continued with the original structure despite the petition, and students across the region, including those in Saint Lucia, are waiting to see whether the pressure from the letter and continued complaints changes the policy for the academic years ahead.