Enhancement and open discussion session www.nearpod.com/ Sid Hayes – Director of Education

Challenges across the sector and we would hope that external examiners could help place our work in the evolving national context. Including appropriate use of the full marking range, while still being conscious of the ‘noise’ surrounding grade inflation/enhanced learning. We want our marking schemes to fully differentiate the range of work provided by students. Completed considerable work on our border zone algorithm to remove excessive levels of discretion. (undergraduate) ‘Good’ degrees at Brighton have increased at a slightly slower pace than the sector and we are certainly not at the extreme end of this.

Student Feedback For new and experienced external examiners at Brighton Have you had access to student feedback e.g. module surveys/other forms of student feedback? Would you like access to this if you have not had it? This academic year we have implemented a simple standardised set of questions that all schools should be using.

Quality enhancement areas Second marking processes need to be clearly visible to external examiners. We are also encouraging colleagues across the institution to make it clear on the sample which has been selected for second marking, that second marking processes are also clearly visible to students. Hoping to improve student perceptions of ‘fairness’

Feedback on feedback We have been trying to ensure compliance with students receiving feedback within 20 working days and we have also been trying to work on the quality of the feedback which the students receive. Whilst we have not been prescriptive we have identified areas of good practice and encouraged schools to try to model good practice e.g. Three good things about a piece of work and three ways to improve future pieces of work (feedforward). It will be interesting to get external examiners feedback on the quality of feedback which is offered to students.

External examiner sampling At Brighton we are moving more towards a digital approach to external examining work though this is not necessarily consistent across the whole institution. If you have been working electronically/online how easy was it to access the required material? Work samples are normally determined at school level but we would welcome some feedback after your external examiner experience on whether or not you would prefer the teaching team to identify the sample or would you prefer to determine the sample which you look at.

Anonymous Marking University of Brighton is moving towards greater use of anonymous marking where possible. We are aware of the debate surrounding it. One of the distinguishing features of our assessment portfolio, in many discipline areas, is that we have professional practice based assessment which cannot be anonymised.

We are aware of differential success rates across a range of different groups within the institution and we want to be sure that our marking arrangements are not responsible for differential success rates across different groups of students. It would be interesting to know what happens at your own institution as well as other institutions where you may have been an external examiner other than Brighton.