Here are the slides from the afternoon plenary session of the Module Deliberation and Delivery Day on “Assessment Review and Marking”.

At that event Pete highlighted some principles and changes in the university’s General Examination and Assessment Regulations (GEAR). In particular:

  • All summative assessments at levels 5,6, and 7 should be internally and externally reviewed before publication to students.
  • The waiver for assessments with less than 50% weighting has disappeared.

As a part of the deliberation, we discussed whether Level 4 assessments should be externally reviewed. Two viewpoints were advanced:

  1. L4 assessments are the first ones experienced by our students, and play an important role in shaping their perceptions of assessment, and therefore their subsequent success
  2. L4 assessments do not form part of the degree classification algorithm.

On balance, the mood of the meeting was to have L4 assessments externally reviewed as well, due to (i) above.

To  confirm that BBS will work towards this as a goal for 2019-20. Unfortunately this cannot fully implemented this academic year, as some new arrangements will need to be made with our External Examiners.

The undergraduate and postgraduate will send out assessment review and deadlines. These will include a slightly revised (green) assessment review form. More detailed notes have been added to the back of the form (2nd page) to assist colleagues in filling out the form. It is a complicated form because it serves three purposes:

  1. Provides an audit trail of the internal review process
  2. Provides an audit trail of the external review process and amendments
  3. Captures information for the offices to set up the electronic submission point and feedback path to students.

All of these are extremely important. The student perception of Assessment and Feedback (from NSS) is one of the 6 key metrics that will be used to judge whether BBS is rated at ‘bronze’, ‘silver’ or ‘gold’ in the new subject based Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF 2). The process should help us to improve the design of assessments and feedback communications to students.