Medical Student Faces £90,000 Legal Bill.

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554618/Medical-student-took-university-court-failing-six-year-degree-one-mark-faces-90-000-legal-bill-losing-court-battle.html

On first reading this, one has got to show some sympathy towards Mr Crawford, but then reading further:

/// Mr Crawford, who is originally from Kilburn, London, but now lives in Australia, began his studies on Tyneside in October 2005 and completed the first four stages of his degree with no problems. ///

Was he hoping to escape his university fees by landing a job in Australia?

[Old_Jim]

The law is a rich man's game. Once you start issuing High Court writs you are at a poker table where the loser faces bankruptcy.

So let's assume he failed his MBBS by one mark and successfully sued. He finishes up with a marginal pass degree from a now bankrupt college plus a reputation for litigation. Would you employ him as a doctor - even in Australia?

[jno]

thousands of doctors have gone to work in Australia, so it was unlikely to be anything to do with legal costs

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/27/exodus-nhs-doctors-australia

Whether failing by one mark turns him from a good doctor into one to be avoided, I don't know.

[anotheoldgit]

jno

/// thousands of doctors have gone to work in Australia, so it was unlikely to be anything to do with legal costs ///

I didn't say it had anything to do with legal costs, I was referring to University fees.

[jno]

so you were, sorry. I thought you had to pay fees in advance, but I don't know. If not then working in a better environment while you make the money to pay them off would be an attractive option.

[factor-fiction]

I don't think you have to pay them back if you work outside the UK, jno, as fees are repaid from UK income tax. (That's how it works for other student loans anyway.)

[jno]

oh, right, thanks ff.

[youngmafbog]

Perhaps he should have worked harder like those that passed. The man is clearly a fool and better off not practising on the public.

[Sqad]

There is more to this story that meets the eye.

It is more difficult to fail your medical final examination than it is to pass them.

I didn"t know that it was possible to fail by one mark.

[jno]

I wondered about that, Sqad. You'd think if someone just wasn't up to the job he'd have been found out in the first few years of study. This guy seems to have breezed through those yet fallen, but a toenail, at the last hurdle. That sounds very unusual. Maybe he'd already left the country and was sitting his finals while on a surfboard at Bondi.

[factor-fiction]

I too doubt that he failed by one mark. In such circumstances I'm sure the university would have bent over backwards to help him over the line- perhaps with a viva voce or a resit- or even a review of their marking

[Sqad]

Just a little story for you.
Surgery finals in 1979 in London asked for her complaint to be heard, which was that in the viva, she always has the same examiner who had given her a rough time and could she please be examined in her next viva by a different examiner.

We had a discussion over lunch and then met her in the afternoon and explained that yes, we would make sure that she wasn't examined by this surgeon, but before we did this we thought that she should know that " this examiner" was the only person that had EVER passed her in her surgical vivas.

[jno]

ff, jno jnr missed out on a first class BA by one mark. I discovered to my surprise when he was reading Engish that they stilll awarded marks for spelling and grammar in essays. (In my day, if you couldn't spell, you didn't take English, you did engineering or something). Anyway, it turned out in one essay he'd used the word "resonsible" - and lost a mark because his tutor thought it should have been "responsable". And that was the missing mark.

Obviously I was all for driving to the uni and beating the tutor to death with the volumes of the big OED, one by one. jno jnr dissuaded me and said he was going to do a masters, after which nobody would care what sort of BA he had; and so it proved. But modern education seems to be a funny thing.