External Examining

[damekindness]

I’ve been an EE in various institutions for a long time. I certainly don’t do it for the money - but it’s useful for networking and gathering ideas etc

I had an email from one module lead on Tuesday requesting review of a module submissions by Friday for an exam board and another module lead the day after requesting the same.

is this a reasonable request?

Not at all. I need two weeks to look at scripts for my EE gigs. If it's more than one module then sometimes I need longer. I'd let them know what's reasonable for you. I'd expect a decent ML or prog lead to understand this.

@Justkeepingplatesspinning thanks - needed a sense check

The place I’m at has been well organised with asking for review in the past. I wonder whether redundancies and associated resourcing issues are impacting here - trying to be kind but I can’t easily carve out time for EE work because of those very reasons

It could well be, or related to strike action which is pushing all sorts of deadlines out and causing hassle. The unis need externals or their students don't get their marks confirmed easily, so they need to play nicely.

I've been an External at various places over the last 20 years, and this isn't reasonable. For example, just on Friday, I had an email from the Assessment Officer where I'm current externalling, laying out the modules they want me to look at, and the dates of the Summer and Resit Exam Boards.

If I were you, I'd contact the Assessment or Exams Officer. It looks like a disorganised or inexperienced module convenor. All this sort of stuff should go through the Assessment /Exams Officer anyway (who should be an academic, not a Professional Services colleague).

Our EEs have to do v tight turnaround for us. We have 20 working days for assessing work including internal examination. Usually this takes us right up to the deadline to get grades on the system and our exam board is a few days later. It means even if I crack the whip with the team and work really hard to get samples uploaded and organised, our EE will only ever get a week absolute max.

I'm a good prog lead but my hands are tied by our registry dates.

Or turnaround is also very tight but this is an admin issue. We are supposed to have 3 weeks to return work (and the entire team is part time). Our assessment boards are scheduled only a week last we so there isn’t even really time to mark and moderate, never mind externally examine. It’s appalling.

@Mumteedum Reading between the lines in the emails from the module leads I think this is the issue - there seems to be a change in process that the academic staff are struggling with

@LittleBigHead In my various EE roles I’ve only ever dealt with individual academic programme/course teams and not a designated exam officer. It’s remarkable how differently institutions do things differently as PPs have noted!

@Mumteedum that sounds - well, ridiculous. Not your fault of course!

But why oh why does academics' work now get dictated to by administrative staff? They generally have little idea of what we actually do when marking (one of our administrators said she didn't know why we bothered to take such time & discuss & check our marking with each other).

We have a 3 week turnaround to mark, second mark, agree marks, write substantive feedback, process the marks, then get them back to admin staff - who tell us they need at least 3 working days to process marks. So basically, we have 2 weeks to mark & second mark anything up to 100 essays ... and my place gives our students a No Questions Asked extension for 3 days, which does not extend the time available to mark - thus 14 days turns into 11 days, which is actually only 10 days because it takes a day for the essays to be released to us electronically.

While we're teaching ...

It drives me crazy