Anglia Ruskin University

Hi, I’m a first year student at ARU and wanted to ask for some clarification on how compensation for failed modules works. I’m a bit confused about the regulations.

Generally speaking, "compensation" is where is university turns a blind-eye to failure in one or more modules and awards you the associated credits anyway. There are normally lots of rules which limit when and where compensation can be applied, and Anglia Ruskin is no exception in that regard. (In fact, one of those rules renders the whole concept of compensation effectively dead-in-the-water.
The extracts below are from Anglia Ruskin's Academic Regulations (17th edition) (PDF).
At Anglia Ruskin, compensation doesn't necessarily apply to all courses, as 6.111 includes the following, "Compensation may be excluded from other courses (or element(s) within them) only if exclusion is required by a PSRB (for which written evidence is required at the academic approval stage)." So, if you think you might need to take advantage of compensation, the first thing to check would be the course programme to ensure it's not excluded.
Although compensation can be applied to levels 3 through 6 (i.e. year 0 through 3), it's limited to 30 credits in any one year and 45 credits for the entire course. When deciding whether compensation must be applied or not, they'll check the weighted average of your best 75 credits in the current level (year) to check that it's at least 45%. If it's not, they compensation can't be applied. (As it's name suggests, "compensation" is trying to offset a poor mark in one module with good marks elsewhere - hence why they check how you've done in other modules.)
Anglia Ruskin then have this unusual rule that you also need to have reached the "qualifying mark" in each assessment of the failed module. You'll need to check the module definition for this, but it's typically going to be 40%. Given that the module pass mark is going to be 40%, the only way you could have failed the module is if you got less than 40% for at least one of the assessments within that module. So when 6.115 mandates that "the qualifying mark has been achieved in all items of assessment for the module(s) for which compensation is being considered" they're effectively saying that compensation can never been applied. The only way it could be is if either the module pass mark was above 40% of the assessment "qualifying mark" was below 40%. Both of those scenarios are unlikely, I suspect, hence compensation isn't really available at Anglia Ruskin.
(Perhaps your course doesn't have the 40% qualifying mark for each assessment - but the course I just checked, Optometry, appears to have so for every assessment in every module I just checked.)

Thank you so much, I really appreciate this

The qualifying mark for my course is 30% in each assignment, and 40% overall for the module. I didn’t get 30% in one of my assignments, so does that mean I won’t be able to get compensation? The rules at ARU are really strange compared to unis my friends attend.

Unfortunately, that does mean that compensation can't be applied, yes.

Ahh that’s a shame, thank you anyways!!

Hi, I’m a first year student at ARU and wanted to ask for some clarification on how compensation for failed modules works. I’m a bit confused about the regulations.