In the Dark

Over the last few days we have been having our annual meetings of the Board of Examiners in the Department of Physics at Maynooth. This process began last Friday with a preliminary meeting of those involved in the theoretical side of the Department, continued on Monday with another preliminary meeting for the experimentalists, continued yesterday with a final meeting with both sides of the house and a visit by two External Examiners, and ended this morning with a meeting I couldn’t attend with feedback. This is the first time since the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics merged that we have run the process like this. I think one of the primary purposes of the merger was to streamline the bureaucracy, but it seems to have had the opposite effect, with everything taking much longer. It was ever thus.

Still, at least I got a nice dinner with the Externals.

Since we have reached the end of the academic year, we looked yesterday at the final grades of those students who are completing their studies this year in order to consider the classification of their degrees. Another (pleasant) duty of our Examination Board was to award prizes for the best performance, not just for finalists but for students at every stage, including the first year. These will be announced in due course.

But that’s not quite the end of it – there is an overall University Examination Board that covers all courses in the University to formally bring an end to the examination process. It is not until after all the Boards have done their business that the students get their marks. If all goes to plan, students will receive their final marks onThursday 25th June, a couple of weeks from now.

In previous years this would have been followed by a Consultation Day on which:

Staff will be available in all Departments to discuss results with students. Students are entitled to see their examination scripts if they wish, these will be generally available on this day or at another mutually convenient time.

In its drive to scrap everything that could possibly be useful to students, however, Maynooth University has now ditched the formal Consultation Day. Well, you can’t expect a University running an €11M surplus to put any resources into processes for advising students can you?

If I had my way we would actually give all students their marked examination scripts back as a matter of routine. Obviously examination scripts have to go through a pretty strict quality assurance process involving the whole paraphernalia of examination boards (including External Examiners), so the scripts can’t be given back immediately but once that process is complete there doesn’t seem to me any reason why we shouldn’t give their work, together with any feedback written on it,  back to the students in its entirety. I have heard it argued that under the provisions of the Data Protection Act students have a legal right to see what’s written on the scripts – as that constitutes part of their student record – but I’m not making a legalistic point here. My point is purely educational, based on the benefit to the student’s learning experience, so this is unlikely to be adopted.

So that’s my internal examination duties here at Maynooth done and dusted. In a month or so I have to travel abroad to be an external examiner at another institution.