Cultural Differences, Academic Edition
at least this time I’m not discussing sleeping with students.
I’ve been remiss in keeping up with LGM responsibilities as a lot is happening in a short period of time, including a couple conference papers I’m presenting in April (WPSA and MPSA) that are in various states of incompletion. There’s also the catching up on grading thing, which leads to this brief observation (and serves as a low cost way of getting used to our new neighborhood).
One of the many differences between British and American academic culture is the oversight. In the US, the professor (or TA) grades, and that’s it. Here, every class is “second marked”, where every “first” (e.g. an A), every fail, and a sample of the grade brackets in between, are given to a colleague to check your marks. This works well for classes with TAs: my first and second year classes are marked first by my TAs, then I do the second marking; if it’s a new TA who has never graded before, I do second mark every piece of work for the first assignment and we have a meeting about her or his work.
However, there’s a gulf in experience between a first-year TA, and me, but the culture requires that all of my work is checked as well when I’m the primary marker. Then, for every class aside from first year classes, a sample is ultimately sent to the “external examiner” — again, all firsts, fails, and a sample of the intermediaries — to serve as a tertiary layer of “quality assurance”. This extends to the final exams I write: the questions for a final exam to be taken at the end of a year long class, in late May, must be submitted to the faculty office in late Autumn, then it’s sent to the external examiner who comments . . .
A seldom commented upon aspect of these relationships is that they can be quite cozy. My existing external does take his job quite seriously, thus he has a raft of comments about how we can improve many aspects of our instruction which he makes public at our departmental “panel” meetings every June. However, the norm is cozy, which makes one wonder that for all this work and effort, is this really quality assurance, or is it ass covering? There are benefits to these arrangements, such as the annual panel for the MA in International Relations that I have inexplicably been teaching on for six years now, where my seminar on methods, research design, and professionalization receives an annual laudatory paragraph from the external. Not bad for a guy who didn’t so much as offer a sub-field in IR in grad school.
That said, having grown up and been trained in the US culture, I find all this oversight suggestive of a broader untrusting culture in general, and it belies exposes the complete lack of autonomy we have as academics in Britain specifically.
I find all this oversight suggestive of a broader untrusting culture in general, and it belies the complete lack of autonomy we have as academics in Britain specifically.
Nitpick: not “belies”, surely? “Demonstrates”?
bingo, thanks; I was thinking as I was just walking into the office ‘did i use belies?’, which seeing as how i did, belies my mastery of my native language. now to teach myself how to edit in the new environment . . .
“underlies” was the word you were seeking . . .
Also, the final para is a bit startling: having someone else check your marking is some sort of intolerable infringement on academic freedom and a sign that British culture in general is just generally mistrustful? Bit of a leap, isn’t it?
“lack of autonomy”? Really? As someone who went through the US system, I have to say such checks and balances sound refreshingly respectful to students. I was always appalled as a grad student how little guidance there was as far as teaching and grading were concerned– particularly when you consider how much students were paying to be there…
I’m adjunct faculty, and I teach med students, so my experience is probably more trade-school than academic; that said, I was astounded at the latitude and lack of concrete standards presented to me by the school’s administration regarding grading. (That was true at the beginning; since then, I just keep makin’ it up as I go along, and the students don’t seem to mind.) If I had an external, my students would probably get lower grades. I’m a pushover.
I have to agree- I’m an adjunct that teaches law students (mostly– I also teach an occasional undergraduate course). There is no oversight concerning grades at my institution that I’ve ever seen, and that’s always struck me funny. On the one hand, I think students over-emphasize the importance of grades. On the other hand, grades are some indication of a teacher’s effectiveness, and I’d think someone would be interested in looking at them.
Something that my school does do is to offer regular workshops on teaching methods, and I’d be interested in knowing how common that is.
In many UK universities (such as the one I work at): *all* assessed work is double marked (at least in the humanities), and work at the borderlines and fails are triple-marked (and possibly more if there is continuing disagreement) and then additionally seen by the external.
I’ve never really seen this as an imposition on academic autonomy; more of a confession that we can make marking somewhat more reliable and fair and try to avoid gross errors of judgement that have very substantial effects on student’s careers.
I’d really like to see a history of external examining as a practice – I believe, but don’t have much evidence to draw on, that it is, like anonymous marking and double marking, a product of organised student demands for fairness in the 60s/70s/80s.
Clearly externals don’t and can’t (as the government would like) produce exact comparability of degree class across institutions and degree subjects, but if you see it as a source of ideas, improvements, a critical friend, etc, then it has some very positive effects. (In a previous job, many years ago, the external was a really important person in preventing our examining committee from doing terrible things due solely to laziness.)
I should emphasize that I find it by and large different; I was not making an explicit normative statement on whether or not second / third marking is a fundamentally good or bad thing. Furthermore, as I’ve been here seven years, I’m more than used to it by now and it’s part of the job. Indeed, I take advantage the system when I’m less than completely certain e.g. every “9″ I assign will go to the second marker, and if a student has even the faintest hint of a complaint, I happily send those off to the external with the proviso that if you accept that we’re falliable, we can be falliable in both directions . . .
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that it’s an “intolerable infringement on my academic freedom”. It’s just grading, FFS. It is, however, a lot more work, coordination, and bureaucracy; and I’m not sure that the benefit justifies the investment involved.
That said, we do lack autonomy in most every area I can imagine when compared to the US, not just the grading side of things. That, I’ll stand by.
I found it a shock too.
I have a good relationship with my internal moderators, but they always catch useful stuff and, esp. for the first time I taught a class, they caught that the exam was fairly unbalanced (way too hard).
I’ve known academics in the states to not produce an exam until very close to the exam point. That doesn’t seem ideal either for them or the students.
I’m not sure what, exactly, the infringement of autonomy is, at least with respect to setting and marking exams. I’m not free to set my exam the week before the exam is given (which can be a pain as I can’t take into account digressions or differences in emphasis…that is a negative). I am free to push back on moderation comments and often do. I can’t simply override the moderator…but is this a problem? In practice?
We’re moving toward trying to assure more uniformity across courses and graders, esp. with MSc projects where standards are completely out of wack. I guess that infringes on my autonomy, but, well, appropriately :)
i’m not a professional academic. however, as part of my job, i do teach a computer class and intro to fed tax law class. the computer class isn’t graded, but there is oversight and evaluation. the tax law class is tested/graded, first by the direct instructors, then at the regional & national level. as well, the instructors are evaluated, by both the students and training branch employees.
in addition, my regular work is reviewed at several levels, starting with my group manager, and possibly on up to the joint committee on taxation (and once in a very blue moon, the supreme court).
as a consequence, this is the norm for me, and i really don’t take offence or feel that i’m not trusted. i also know most of the parties involved, but that doesn’t stop us from disagreeing from time to time. it isn’t personal.
that’s mostly the norm for every firm in my industry. perhaps it’s american academia that’s the odd man out?
I’m in my first year of teaching at a large UK university and I really really appreciate the 2nd marking. Especially having been an undergrad in the US and in France where the marking is all based on ‘gut’ decisions from which I have benefitted and suffered.
I once had a prof decide that no undergrad (in a mixed UG/MA class) could score higher than a B+. I also had a french prof try to cozy up to my girlfriend at the time (who he was stalking. she was italian and remarkably ok with the situation. I would have had the police on him) by giving me the highest marks in the class for every class I took with him.
As a young lecturer, I have no real body of reference (except my own experience) for setting essays/exams and marking papers. I’m much happier being in a situation where I know i’m not the final word!
In my experience of UK academics, they can easily be a whole degree-class apart in their marking, and perfectly sincere in their convictions. Unless US academics are somehow miraculously better, I’ll take a second-marking system every time – for rigour, for comsistency, and for doing justice to student work.
I was not making an explicit normative statement on whether or not second / third marking is a fundamentally good or bad thing.
From the post: “for all this work and effort, is this really quality assurance, or is it ass-covering?…I find all this oversight suggestive of a broader untrusting culture in general, and it exposes the complete lack of autonomy we have as academics in Britain specifically.”
I agree, it’s very difficult to tell from that whether the author agrees or disagrees with double marking.