A court case against the University of Otago claims that the Uni unlawfully admitted students who did not meet the minimum requirements to enter med school. According to the statement of claim, these students were admitted to medicine through the Mirror on Society (MoS) preferential entry pathway and the international student pathway.
Because of this, the claimant argues that the process for med school admission was unlawful and discriminatory. The person bringing the case cannot be identified by Critic because they were given name suppression on 22 September, but the statement of claim does make it clear that their child was denied entry to the 2020 med cohort. Critic has access to the statement of claim.
The Uni rejected these arguments in its defence to the claim. They have not yet responded to Critic’s request for comment. In an letter to med school staff and students a few weeks ago, they said that the challenge to the MoS Policy “is not [a principle] that the University accepts and which it will strenuously oppose before the Court.”
Basically, the argument is that the Uni can only give preferential entry to students who are from under-represented groups if those students meet the same minimum entry requirements as general entry students. The claim centres around section 224 of the Education Act, which appears to make the minimum entry requirements the same for everyone. The Uni would therefore not have the option to admit students who did not meet both entry requirements, even if they were from under-represented groups.
The minimum entry requirements for medicine are a grade of 70% and completion of the UCAT (University Clinical Aptitude Test) to the standard set by the medicine admissions committee. The Medical Admissions Committee (MAC) decides on the minimum requirements for medicine, and the claim argues that the preferential entry pathways allowed students to be admitted “[a]t academic standards lower than domestic students following a discretionary process operated by MAC” and “[r]unning an ad hoc discretionary system of admission for the Preference Categories”.
The University admitted, in their statement of defence, that for Mirror on Society students they sometimes "relied on alternative assessment measures to those provided by the UCAT".
“The affirmative action scheme lacked objective parameters and was based on unlawful discretions by MAC and unfairly favoured students in the Preference and International Categories,” the claimant stated.
This was unlawful, the claim argues, because the University “did not apply the Minimum Entry Requirements for the HSFY [Health Sciences First Year] category to certain students admitted under that category under the MoS Policy”.
The claim also argues that the admission of international students “displaced domestic students” and, because of that, was unlawful under the Education Act. The claimant also argues that the Uni breached the Fair Trading Act because if they “had known of the true character of the University of Otago admissions scheme, he would have funded his child to go to another university and has as a consequence incurred wasted expenditure”.
The claimant is asking for the Court to declare that “HSFY students were unlawfully discriminated against and disadvantaged by the University of Otago contrary to the Education Act section 181(d)”. They also ask for a declaration that their child was unlawfully excluded from med.