Committee Work

Work at Leeds Met also involves participating in committees. Today I am scheduled to attend the examiners board meeting at a partner college in our "Regional University Network (RUN)". While the approach to have many people thoroughly go through each student and confirm the results is very laudable and shows a high commitment to quailty and fairness, it appears to me that this is a bit of an overkill. What the 13 attending people did, was basically to look at the students' grades and determine their degree classification. In principle, a computer could to that task simpler and more efficiently. Of course, in such meetings it is possible to uncover problems and mistakes, and critical cases can be discussed. But I still think that there might be a more efficient way of dealing with this. Either to do it online, with online collaboration tools, or do some kind of automatic verification / validation, maybe only with a smaller number of people. It seems to me quite a significant amount of resources to be spent on these meetings, to invite several external examiners who have to come to the meeting location.