a_cubed | Stressful Meetings

Well, we had our internal examiners' meeting yesterday for our final year students - the externals come in next week and we have another meeting with them.I've always found these meetings quite stressful but this year's was much much worse. The University has decided that these meetings must take place in complete anonymity for the students and this meant that the majority of what we used to do in these meetings, which was check that we had the marks right for our modules for students on borderlines, and for tutors and project supervisors to argue for those below the formal borderline to be given the grade above the border (or not), became completely impossible. The only substantial thing I feel I did in a three and a quarter hour meeting was with respect to a student whose case I recognised because he was my tutee and supervisee. While I know about, and understand some of the basis of, psychological research about bias, I really think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and are disadvantaging students by not being able to treat them like people, but only as a set of numbers. I'm hoping that after this year we'll be able to have a very short meeting dealing with the few minor things left, which are mainly to do with taking the recommendations of the small committee that look at "extenuating circumstances" and applying their recommendation anonymously (which now means we can be given details of the case rather than before where we could know that a named student had extenuating circumstances but not what they were, and leave everything else to individual discussions between the head of the exam board and the staff who know about issues.

Laurie Taylor's Poppleton piece in this week's (17/6/05) THES was right on the mark for how I felt.

Oh well, back to the three grant proposals I'm currently working on, trying to answer the copy-editors queries on the book and write up my LLM dissertation.