The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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1:10pm on Tuesday, 10th June, 2014:
Anecdote
"The University have introduced a policy this year whereby any module aggregate mark ending with a 9 needs to be checked and verified by the Module Supervisor. "
So, in order to check that people who are close-but-no-cigar shouldn't actually be getting a cigar, the marks for any student with an aggregate (for coursework and exam) that ends in 9 must be checked. Of course, we don't check the marks that end in 0, which presumably are equally susceptible to being the wrong side of a grade boundary.
Still, checking marks: how hard can that be?
CE301 is the final-year project. The coursework is marked in 6 or 7 parts. Some of those parts are themselves broken up into 7 or 8 parts. All are marked separately by the supervisor and the second assessor, who have to agree a consolidated mark each time. We don't have any of the material we marked available to us, as it came in paper form and is probably in a warehouse somewhere.
We were told of this yesterday. We have to check and verify the X9 module markings by tomorrow.
I expect that because no-one checks and verifies that we ourselves have actually checked and verified the marks, we can just lie and say we've checked and verified when we haven't. Not that any of us would consider such a deceit, naturally.
Another point is that we only have to check the coursework if we don't find any changes to make with the exam marks. As checking coursework is a pain (especially when your feedback came in audio form, as it does for one of my assignments), there is an incentive to make a change to the exam mark to avoid this. This therefore all sounds like a cynical exercise in boosting the marks we give our students so they get better grades and make us appear higher in the university league tables. Except...
One of my modules, CE317, has 30% coursework, 70% exam. The 30% coursework is split 20% for assignment 1, 10% for assignment 2 - or at least that's what I told the students. However, in calculating which students got a mark ending in 9, it used a 10/10/80 split. That's wrong. It needs to be changed. If we hadn't had this tiresome exercise, CE317 students would have wound up with the wrong results.
So yes, it is a pain, but in my case it found a problem in time to fix it.
It's still a pain, though...
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Copyright © 2014 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).