The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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2:52pm on Wednesday, 27th September, 2023:
Anecdote
We had an Educational Away Day at the university today. As usual, it was neither away nor a day, but it was actually educational. All our key performance indicaters have risen, so we're no longer in special measures (not that being in special measures helped increase them one iota). We've no idea how many undergraduates we're getting when term starts next week; we know how many offers have been accepted, but that bears no relationship to how many undergraduates will materialise. We expect it to be lower, though, as we raised our entrance requirements so we're only in the bottom 40% for Computer Science departments now.
The exam/assessment results for last year have been published. Around 2 in 5 of our final-year students got a first-class degree, which sounds excessive but may perhaps be explained by the fact that around 1 in 4 of our second-year students didn't progress. If the weak students don't make it to the third year, they don't bring down the averages. The university would prefer it if they did make it to the third year, though, so I expect that ratio of firsts to come down in due course.
We were criticised for not leaving enough feedback for our project students. It transpired that most of us were leaving a great deal of feedback, but not in the boxes on the mark sheet that are scraped and sent to the students. We have to cut and paste from the unscraped boxes and put the text in the scraped boxes so the students will see that they do get feedback. It won't help our National Student Assessment returns because it comes after they've filled in that form: they'll have already complained that we don't leave enough feedback. Oh well!
There was (let's call it) coffee provided, but no biscuits. There was lunch, though: sandwiches, fresh from the freezer.
This was a face-to-face meeting, but with luck the entire department won't go down with COVID-19 and miss Fresher's Week.
Only three more years of this at most before I retire.
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Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).