Student review [#20849] for Law
at University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a really good school. The career prospects are excellent, the campus is stunning, the quality of teaching is superb, and the location couldn’t be more convenient. I have scheduled lots of extra support sessions and have been replied to and seen promptly. The discussion boards for my specific subject are regularly regulated and contributed to by the lecturers. There really are a multitude of fantastic features to this school.

However, on the administration/technology side, they leave a lot to be desired. The UoB app rarely works, often you have to restart it several times for it to finally work. Once in, the timetable function is a bit awkward to read and on multiple occasions I have missed lectures because the timetable section didn’t show me that I had anything to attend. When I did arrive to lectures, we were told to enter an attendance code to register our attendance. This function either loaded and loaded or wasn’t given a code at all. This meant we had to go to a separate google form to record our attendance malfunction. I have no idea what my attendance will be this year as half of my attendance marks may not have counted at all. Other universities have a card system for lectures and a manual register for seminars, I don’t understand why UoB have complicated it so much.

Also, the online portal seems needlessly complicated. There’s no ‘modules’ tab, so I have to scroll through all of the irrelevant topics to find my actual module. Even when I find my module the layout seems somewhat counterintuitive. I don’t know if Canvas is just an awkward platform, or UoB aren’t using it correctly but moodle seemed so much more intuitive and easy to use.

Overall it’s a great university, it just lets itself down on the technology side of things which can be very frustrating.