CHIEF EXECUTIVE
PROFESSOR SIR STEVE SMITH AcSS
Northcote House
The Queen’s Drive
Exeter
UK EX4 4QJ
Telephone+44 (0)1392 263000
Fax+44 (0)1392 263008
Web
SS/RB
31 July 2012
Dear Andrew
Professor Hawley:External Examiner’s Report 2011-2012
College of Humanities: English
BA English
Good Practice:
The Department of English offers an excellent range of courses. New courses have been introduced and older ones updated. The quality of the work produced by students is consistently high. The department offers extensive feedback and the students evidently benefit from it as there is a marked improvement between second and third years. Teaching for the Dissertation was particularly good. All those I moderated were structured and presented with a high degree of professionalism. The quality of writing has improved over the 4 years I have externalled here. Almost all the students whose work I read had an excellent command of English (which is not the case in all English Departments). Another key area of improvement was the integration of text and context, literature, history and criticism in all of the courses I moderated. Students graduate with a sophisticated awareness of the complexities of the subject.
Recommendations:
Essential: Areas of concern which, in your opinion, place academic quality and/or standards at risk and require an immediate response from the Associate Dean for Education.
While I am satisfied that staff take assessment very seriously and treat each piece of work they mark very professionally, the university's moderating procedure is not in line with practices employed elsewhere. In particular, the instruction that markers should 'Moderate a sample of feedback sheets, checking marks against feedback to ensure that the mark awarded reflects Departmental assessment criteria and classification' is necessary but not a sufficient way of ensuring that marking is accurate. Marks and feedback must be checked against the scripts themselves. If this places an excessive burden on the second marker, something else needs to be changed to free up more time.
The External provides further comment on this elsewhere in the report:
The process whereby some courses are moderated solely by means of sampling some feedback sheets to check whether comments tally with marks is not adequate. It guarantees only the coherence of the system on a superficial level, not that the marks correspond to the scripts or that the feedback is appropriate for that piece of work. In my experience, other universities sample by actually reading scripts.
Advisable: Areas of concern regarding threshold standards which, while currently being met, in your opinion, could be significantly improved.
None
Desirable: Areas where, in your opinion there is potential for enhancement.
The department has undergone an extensive programme of revision and change for a number of years, some of it motivated by the desire to improve, some of it seemingly motivated by administrative rather than educational imperatives. I hope that the changes will be given time to bed down before any more time-consuming major overhauls are instituted.
It was the External Examiner’s final year of appointment and they leave the following comments:
The Department is rightly regarded as one of the finest in the country. One measure of that excellence is the continuous refinement of design, delivery and assessment of courses. I would like to identify 4 key improvements I have observed:
1an improvement in the quality of the students' writing across the board;
2an improvement in the structuring (both formal and intellectual) and presentation of dissertations and long essays;
3the integration of text, context and criticism in the students' work;
4The introduction of well-designed new modules and the updating of more established courses.
The procedures contained in the TQA Manual look to a response normally within eight weeks after appropriate internal discussion within the College including an opportunity for input from the staff meeting and the College’s Education Strategy Group. However, as the External Examiner has raised an Essential recommendation, an immediate response is required to the specific issues raised in this section.
Please note that the University’s statement of procedures also requires that the College’s next annual main meeting of the Boards of Examiners for the programmes in question, at which an External Examiner is present, should include early in its agenda a copy of the External Examiner’s report and of the College’s response.
Yours sincerely
Professor Sir Steve Smith
Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive
ccJo Hatt