Chaos today! A resit CBT was scheduled to run in a lab with 56 seats -- no worries, I thought, only ~40 students will be taking it. Booking the room through official channels seemed like a good way to ensure the room is available (natch?) but , oh no, that would be too easy! The room is being refurbished (no-one was told) and the largest available room seats 36, with 2 broken PCs (34 working seats). 38 students turn up so one starts off doing the test on paper whilst standing up! And another wants to come back 30 minutes later for a free PC ... meaning I'll be there for longer than anticipated just because there is no "joined-up thinking" in the University admin. :-(

Further admin-derived chaos: The letters telling 13 students they had to do a CBT and a coursework didn't go out complete ... they tell me the day before the test that the coursework was OK, the test notices never went out! So I have to waste time phoning these poor souls, some of whom had heard through various channels that there was a test, to cancel the test so as not to disadvantage any of them! Not to mention the hours I spent designing the damn CBT in the first place!

Irony: The Faculty Admin Manager earns £50k+ (a bit less then double a lecturer's salary) and was "promoted from within" ... which is the usual fate for management-types who can't seem to cope in lesser positions in this University! Moral: Don't have standards, be crap at your job, rubber-stamp the students through as the University will do its damnedest to make assessing them correctly bloody difficult!