Getting MAB victims into their gowns and out of the door will have long term consequences

In comparison to the “no detriment” (yeah, but also no benefit of exit acceleration either) and “no just wait till the marks are ready” solutions, the “just get it marked” thing at least appears to have resolved the issue to the moderate satisfaction of students and regulators.

It’s certainly those in the indefinite delay camp that have been picking up the worst of the press coverage.

But I think there’s a looming problem coming for many of those in the “just get it marked” camp. And that’s that academics and students tend to talk to each other.

Great to see you

They bump into each other at the graduation ceremony. They add each other as friends on social media. They follow each other on social media. They seek and supply references, see each other in the supermarket and staff might even be teaching them next year when the undergrad starts their postgrad course or the PGT student becomes a PGR.

And in some cases, students directly approach staff and vice versa to discuss the assessment and marks they’ve been given.

The question that raises is – what if the student got X in a piece of work, and the staff member that would have marked it says that if they’d not been on the MAB, they’d have got Y?

What if said staff explain that the markers can’t have understood the assessments properly if they didn’t design them? What if the student asks why the written feedback doesn’t address the assessment criteria and the MAB-participating staff agree?

What if students see random markers being brought in from other departments or universities? What if the written feedback they saw on drafts is totally different in tone or substance (or summative marks) from the final version?

What’s that smell?

Two problems emerge. The first is that regardless of whether alternative and doubtless technically robust alternative regs have been followed, marks have to smell right to retain credibility.

There’s a reason why league tables tend to always have the same 30 or so universities in the top ten, and there’s a reason why a student working on a dissertation that has followed all the feedback and informal commentary that’s cruising to an 80 per cent mark will raise their eyebrows at a 50 per cent mark.

But even in those circumstances, the alternative arrangements are more often than not being communicated in an “in principle” way. If a university says that its alternative regs still maintain subject and assessment expertise and appropriate moderation, students are going to want to know the detail. How? Who? When? What training? What expertise? And so on.

It might be embarrassing enough to reveal the ingredients of the sausages at the best of times. But when a couple of people end up being sick on them and the supplier says “well the recipe has changed”, the supplier isn’t going to get away with saying “but the ingredients were broadly similar and maintain our high sausagey standards”.

At that point those vomiting will want to know precisely what ingredients are now in the sausages. In detail.

If that’s even more embarrassing to reveal, or those doing the reassurance don’t really know in detail themselves because it’s been delegated to the relevant department, faced with a gap in information folk will fear the worst.

And that will be exacerbated by academic staff who either can’t face telling a student that they thought their final mark would be borderline too, or genuinely believe the student would have got a better mark if they’d have marked it.

Yeah but process

It simply isn’t credible to just say “alt regs, academic judgement” etc if a student has testimony from actual academic staff that suggests they’d have got a first rather than a fail or if the staff are saying their work has been marked by people that don’t know how to do it.

As well as a “reasonable skill and care” issue, it creates a trust issue. And in many ways the magic of academic judgement and students’ inability to challenge it are all based on maintaining high levels of trust.

So as that trust unravels over the next few months as the interactions increase, I suspect it’s universities in this camp that will have the bigger problem on their hands than the delayers.

Some things would help. In England and Wales, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) really does need to set out in dayglo the circumstances under which a student can challenge a MAB mark – which presumably are about robust process(es).

That then implies that universities need to have set out revised processes in detail for students, and then explain when asked precisely how they’ve been followed. That may not involve saying “well someone called Jim Dickinson marked it” but it does involve explaining what sort of people have been drafted in, how they were briefed on the assessments set, and how moderation has worked in more detail than students have routinely been supplied with now.

Frankly, the smartest solution would be to allow students to lodge academic appeals over academic judgement, and to resolve them once the boycott is off. That would involve an enormous climbdown, because it implies that the marks as supplied now can’t be relied on. But if they really can’t be relied on, better to proactively enable students to challenge them now, surely?

When students reflect on why they did well or badly, it’s rarely the marking itself or the system that underpins it that gets identified as the issue. It’s the sliding doors moments of not quite revising enough, or getting your head down for the last stretch of the diss.

But given the final classification can have so much of an impact on some students’ trajectories, I’d assert that the sector ought to prefer students’ reflection not to be “if only they hadn’t messed up my marking” for the rest of their lives as they gaze down on their student loan statement.