Argh! Why is the standard answer to questions like "It's nearly a pass ... can't you do something?" not "Should have worked harder then!"?
We had our annual marks consideration meeting today where:
- we ensure that assessment has been done fairly for all modules (with the assistance of an external examiner or three),
- ensure that transcription errors have not crept in,
- process the outcome from another meeting that dealt with students' mitigating circumstances and
- decide on what form of reassessment people failing the module should be offered, including retake (more commonly known as a summer resit), repeat, ("come back next year") and fail (do not pass go...)
Now I happen to agree that it's important to consider "borderline" cases, especially in our system where the score (%) that a student achieves is translated into a "grade" (A, A± etc) and, moreover, is eventually translated back into a numerical point value (please don't ask me why or I'll start to whimper...) The system means that the boundaries between grades are more significant to students' eventual degree results than a rounded 0.5% might suggest: For example a 1st class degree requires at least 110 points from 12 relevant modules, so what if the student has 0.51% less than a particular grade in one, which translates into 1 of these 110? (0.51%/12 is 20 times smaller than 1/110!)
In my book "borderline" is something close to the rounding error (i.e. less than or equal to 1% below a boundary.) It's not at all surprising that in the eyes of students (who have a vested interest) it's more like "within 5% of a boundary", which actually spans a whole grade, so we resist pressure from them to ratchet their marks upwards ... However it never ceases to amaze me when colleagues ask "Is there anything you can do? <nudge-nudge> <wink-wink>" for students who are usually more than 3% away from passing a module. My response is often "The student should have worked harder then!" (unless there clearly are circumstances beyond the student's control, such as a poor group performance strongly affected by one group member, but usually I'll already have taken that into consideration...) I object to the suggestion that standards are dropping everywhere...
By the way, if a student is good enough to get a grade greater than a pass but is lazy and deliberately aims for a pass to make her life easier and misses the mark by a few percent then, hey, it's her own fault and she SHWH!
Sin City
