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Academic

Face-to-Face Feedback Required?

1028616_arrow_rgb_1Can the way that we mark, and return feedback make a difference?

Instead of simply returning marked scripts to students, academics at Edinburgh Napier University invited first-year biomedical sciences students to sit with them while they assessed their work. With students in the room, tutors were able to explain more easily why they were awarding marks and which areas needed improvement, said Charlotte Chalmers, lecturer in biomedical science, who led the pilot study.

The 45 students who took part in the study last year achieved better-than-expected marks in their first-year examinations and higher grades than the rest of the 200-strong cohort who did not participate, DrĀ Chalmers said.

Read full article.

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Academic

Questions of anonymous marking

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1368827

We still don’t have anonymous marking, and I certainly find it wrong in a world where we are increasingly giving feed-forward (and therefore would know whose piece of work it is), and are looking for students to provide personalised assignments using online tools such as blogs – which means we HAVE to know who they are:

In recent years, the practice of “blind marking” students’ written work has become almost universal in UK universities. Why? This is because research indicates that some examiners give higher or lower marks to students they know, or whose sex or race they know, than they would if they did not know whose work they were marking. This is obviously unfair and damaging to the career prospects of students who are marked down. So university administrations have taken action by depriving examiners of the information leading to the bias, and insisting that scripts are anonymised before being assessed. But this strategy is misguided: it does not address the real source of the problem and it seriously damages the educational culture.

When I got my first job as an academic in the late 1960s, assessment was a largely intuitive process, in which academics were hardly more articulate about the criteria they were applying than chicken-sexers, and students were entirely in the dark as to what they needed to do to get good marks. I well remember examiners’ meetings in which colleagues would say things like: “I just sensed from the first paragraph that this candidate has a 2:1-ish sort of mind.” We have come a long way since then, with explicit course specifications and the compulsory training of new teaching staff. Nevertheless, we are still a long way from an ideal world in which students fully understand what is expected of them, and staff assess their work solely on the basis of published criteria rather than on the extraneous characteristics of the individual student. In general, academics have not been good at specifying clear criteria by which written work is to be assessed, or at ensuring that their students internalise these criteria, or at applying them impartially.

In my view, the solution to the problem is not anonymous marking; it is to build on the progress that has already been made towards creating an academic culture in which every teacher takes pride in their professionalism and impartiality, and is respected for it by students and administrators alike. In that culture, students will be treated equally on the basis of their actual performance, and will no more need to be anonymised than patients consulting their doctors, or clients consulting their lawyers.

Read full story… which echoes what I’ve written at the top!

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Academic

Over-zealous risk management?

Tick (http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1335487)Fear of litigation has left some scholars unwilling to criticise students’ work. David Matthews reports

Academics are afraid to give negative student references or put candid remarks on exam scripts because of an overbearing risk-management culture in universities, according to a researcher who has undertaken a two-year study of the issue.

Kim Soin, reader in accounting at the University of Greenwich, said academics needed to engage with the concept of risk management to ensure their concerns were heard, or risk losing “control of what they do and how they do it”.

Dr Soin, who conducted the research with Sharon Wheatley, a lecturer at BPP Business School, said that the growth of risk-management systems in universities had made some academics “quite fearful” and risk averse.

The introduction of Freedom of Information and data protection legislation meant students now had greater access to what academics wrote about them, which had led to fears of legal action.

Read full story… and I wonder what you do? I still mark ‘old-school’ .. I’m interested in seeing the students learn, and mark from a coaching perspective … what help can I give the students to improve, what have they done well, and what can they improve upon (not that I get this right always, of course!).

Categories
Academic

I feel like a marked man

This just rings SO true…

Undergraduate examinations drive Tim Birkhead to the therapist’s couch

I hate to say it, but I really dislike marking examination scripts. I’m not sure if this is unusual, but I feel I need some help…

Therapist: Lie down on the couch and tell me why you feel this way.

Me: I’ve just been asked to mark 500 essays in 24 hours. In principle I could do it, but it gives me only three minutes per script. Three minutes is barely enough time to decipher the unpractised scrawl that most undergraduates think of as writing, let alone write the paragraph justifying the mark I have awarded.

Each year the time frame gets shorter and shorter. There are more exams, more students and less time. Most of my colleagues are on teaching buyouts, so there are fewer and fewer of us to mark papers.

Read full “fictional” debate from Times Higher Education