Investigation: New Points System causes Furore

By Department of Satire

Recently, the University of Kent has implemented the highly controversial Kent Points System (KPS) to encourage “greater achievement” from the UoK body. Following negative press about its academic credibility in recent years, the KPS has been devised as a solution to reverse fortunes. KPS runs on a newly created website, but scores are visible on KentVision, with the system aggregating points from various measures to produce a single score. The criteria consist of attendance, academic grades, deference to the executive, deltoid definition, blood glucose levels and number of library visits.

The full details of the system have not been confirmed yet, but it is rumoured that punitive punishments await those that finish in the bottom 15% each month. One rumoured punishment is ‘orange juice waterboarding’. This method has all of the merits of standard waterboarding but adds another excruciating dimension to the torture: vitamin C deprivation.

This is where the body believes it is being nourished with vitamin C, but then realises it’s not, leading the body to spasmodically convulse to the rhythm of Phil Collins’ drum part in In The Air Tonight. It sounds idiotic, but you’d be surprised at how little vitamin C people actually consume nowadays.

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You’d reason that people would be quite frightened about an authoritarian social rating system. However, some daft sickos in Park Wood simply couldn’t have waited for the system to come into place. Geraldhinius Mejor IV agreed to an interview with one of our correspondents but then it went disastrously wrong. They tussled with our correspondent while grasping raw spaghetti in one hand and The Confessions of St. Augustine in the other. The correspondent attempted to push him off, but they were unsuccessful. CCTV footage shows that Geraldhinius took hold of their flailing leg, lifted it slightly and violently dumped them on the muddy ground.

Another correspondent described their trips to Park Wood as soul crushing. During a meeting they said, “Every time I go to Park Wood some wretched, feral iteration of the genus homo ruins my day.” A few months ago, they were the victim of a celery-bashing, a savage ritualistic melee that was surprisingly high in nutritional content. This correspondent soon quit the DoS and is now in legal battles with people that cannot be named right now due to an injunction. Park Wood does have some redeeming qualities though, such as the fact that much of the first season of The Wire was filmed there. You can also find the spiritual guidance team crying into their sandwiches there too. Delightful.

As expected, tech rollouts and Kent don’t exactly meet eye to eye. Students and staff have been complaining the system have created enormous problems for them. Emails no longer work and if they do, they get rerouted to CCCU instead. Moodle has disappeared for most people on the student/staff guide. It has been replaced by a cryptic webpage that says, “they forgot the damn bills, pay us please!” on it.

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The digital locks across campus have gone haywire with reports of people being locked out of rooms or even locked inside lecture theatres. One lecturer claimed to be locked in his office for two hours, the longest amount of time he has spent in the room. Despite widespread catastrophic infrastructural failures, KentVision is now working perfectly.

In the midst of the chaos, some bored School of Computing professors discovered the backend of the KPS was completely unencrypted. It turned out that the entire KPS was running on a copy of Excel 5.0 on a computer from 1994 that had been jury-rigged to run on the servers somehow. It begs the question on the competency of whoever made this decision. From a social and technological standpoint, the KPS simply doesn’t work. There has been speculation about keeping the system anyway since KentVision actually works flawlessly now.

There have also been comparisons of this system to other corporate merit systems around the world, but these are inaccurate. This system has been a complete and utter failure. Users have found major loopholes and have exploited them to artificially boost their scores. One student managed to reach a million points before he received an email saying that his degree would be free only for the offer to be officially rescinded as a ‘clerical error’.

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The schools of Pol-IR and SSPSSR released the results of a short-term experiment measuring the productivity of the general UoK body. Productivity had cratered from 6% to 5% which has had disastrous effects for everyone. Lecturers stopped working, executives started working, and it all evolved into a calamitous situation.

Many students have criticised the criteria of the new system, with the tracking of blood glucose levels baffling many. Students with higher blood glucose levels are awarded points. Some have theorised that blood sugar has been included as part of a wider conspiracy to stop diabetics from using the library. The theory suggests that diabetics will gain points from blood sugar spikes and will therefore not need to gain points by visiting the library.

Some students have claimed that they have been barred from the library on grounds of blood sugar levels. Tarquin claimed to be one such student: “I was just trying to get into the Templeman but a guard in a bright green uniform stopped me and told me that I looked ‘too sweet for the library’. It was quite nice actually as people usually tell me that I look like a prick.”

Views expressed in InQuire's satire articles are those only of the writer and InQuire does not endorse any of these opinions, this section is dedicated to entertainment purposes only. We use fictitious characters and elements in our stories, except in regards to public figures being satirised directly.