Twitter is brutal isn’t it! I’ll try and spell out my thinking about changing the DMU degree classification system in a little more detail, but there still needs to be a lot of work done on the idea.
The question is, what would changing to an aggregate percentage classification mean for assessment at DMU:
1. With the restriction on funding and places about to hit the university we can no longer tolerate high attrition rates on many of our courses, so we will have to have credible plans in place to mange retention and progression. Government will no longer put up with the large proportions of students who do not progress.
2. There needs to be a change, in my view, away from the culture of administration and regulation to one of support for learning. We will need to improve learners behaviour, experience, practice and individual outcomes. Effectively pushing ownership and responsibility down to the lowest tier, and devolving learner engagement to course teams.
3. This will be represented in a change of vocabulary and language, away from a mass learner experience, to a more individual learner experience – with targets set for individual performance, success and achievement, and a much closer involvement by course teams, keeping learners on track. This becomes about embedding a culture of learning achievement into our operations, based on inputs, rather than focussing on the final outcomes via the classification system. The individual learner will be given much more priority this way. Someone once said to me that DMU spends about 95% of it’s effort thinking about anything other than learning.
4. If we move to a system of ‘aggregate’ classification, then the system for approval and progression will be speeded up. Give learners only one opportunity to complete work (except for legitimate deferrals). Learners will get the mark that they get at the first attempt only, and will therefore not eat up valuable resources because they have not succeeded first time. Too many of our learners see re-sits as a chance to get a second bite, and are effectively rewarded for poor attendance and poor management of their workloads. Doing away with re-sits will lead to a wider differentiation and spread of marks, and will enable course teams to focus on the support for higher achieving learners that we so often don’t get time to manage. As part of the learning process students have to get used to fending for themselves. They have to realise that this is not a rehearsal, but should take their studies seriously on the first occasion.
5. This will then force course teams to pay much more attention to the development and progression of learners, and to provide more detailed route maps and assessment plans for learners to be benchmarked against. The relationship between the learner and the course team will be strengthened because the course teams will have an obligation to provide much more appropriate support, and therefore improve standards of teaching (which across the HE sector are recognised as poor).
6. As a consequence, more responsibility will be put on learners to take ownership of their studies. It is important that each stage of their degree should matter. Why does the first year not count towards their final classification? Why the weighting of one third in the second year and two thirds in their final year of study? The first thing that many of our learners grasp is that they don’t need to do any work until the final year! Attendance in year two is therefore appalling. Why do we allow this? Surely the work that a new learner does in their first year is as important as the work done in the final year – if not more important. Learners then get to the final year and are not equipped to deal with the pressure and the complexity of their studies. Make every year contribute equally to their classification, (i.e. One-third, one-third, one-third) and there will be little excuse for the lifestyle options that many of our learners take up.
7. The administrative support that is presently provided to support the regulation management process (appeals, classifications, tracking, etc), should now be ploughed into supporting the raising the standards of learning and achievement. Weather it is based on teaching in the classroom, on-line or independently, we are not especially vigilant about standards of teaching, and many academic staff ‘do-their-own-thing’ with little reference to good practice, sector standards or teaching theory. Learners suffer from this, which shows in the Student Survey, and an often clear sense of under achievement
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/04/boys-men-education-work]
8. All the caveats and the sub-regulations that have been layered into the regulations over the years suggest that the course teams don’t have confidence in the learning process that they are employing, and instead seek to ‘retro-fit’ the outcomes to squeeze them through the classification system. Each course team will therefore be obliged to produce a benchmark statement for each module and each programme that brings together a more specific and detailed set of learning outcomes. The learners can make reference to this roadmap and use it as a guide when planning their studies. Outside bodies can also view the expectations that we have about our learners transparently. As with so much at DMU, course teams are often only held accountable for their outputs in a vague, wish-full thinking kind of way, but never for their inputs in an empirical and evidence based way.
9. Presently we attempt to bolt-together a wide range of courses, experiences and learning styles across the university through a classification system that is said to somehow guarantee correspondence and continuity between the different courses. Why is this the job of the regulations? Surely, the benchmark statements that the course teams produce should give a more explicit guide the the expectations and the correspondences of different course outcomes? I am in favour of promoting academic diversity and innovating at much lower level of operation across the university. The present regulations hold course teams back from exploring alternative methods of assessment, and tend to promote a conformist and one-size-fits-all model of achievement.
10. Classification is a measuring scale, a heuristic device if you like, that doesn’t presently tell you very much about what is being measured on an individual or a course level. There is an assumption of correspondence between different learning experiences that assumes that all experiences can be justified objectively. The point that this assumption misses, however, is that the learning experience is actually worked through in a social context of justification. There are very real and definite differences between different course outcomes. It is a pretence to assume that we can use the same measuring scale to account for them all equally. The more that we can make the classification process context transparent and open, the more effective we can make the individual learning experiences offered. We need to look outward more, rather than being introspective and stressing about layers of complex administration.
11. Ask yourself if we can strip anything away that doesn’t actually make a difference? What would we be left with? What would be the difference that makes the difference? If we continue on our present course we will keep allowing course teams to add more complexity to the regulations and they will become ever-more difficult to understand and navigate. The classification system in it’s present form is a de-motivating system that doesn’t pain a fair, and realistic picture of learner achievement on an ongoing basis, but instead defers the dashboard snapshot to the very end of their studies. At the last assessment board I attended there was already an accompanying sheet explaining more codes that had been added since the previous year’s board. Will we ever stop tinkering and adding more sub-categories.
12. I think it is also crucial that the classification system should be seen not be in the hands of the course/programme teams to adjust or amend based on their whims and their prejudice. Instead the classification should be a transparent aggregate summation of the work that learners have been encouraged by course teams to undertake. An explanation of what this aggregate figure entails should thus be made based on a validated and published learner-experience-benchmark, giving a fair representation of the individual learner performance. Doing away with consideration bands, re-sits, compensation, etc, will allow us to focus on the learning experience as it happens, and not in retrospect. In the end learners need to be able to value the improvements that they have made.
I’m a pragmatist, and what works is simplicity and local ownership. If the regulations don’t work with a minimum amount of input and control, then we need to change things, but not by adding more complexity.
We perhaps have a small window of opportunity to undertake some thought-experiments like this, and to model the different scenarios and outcomes. Do we keep adding complexity or do we change the culture and push responsibility down to the lowest tier where it belongs- the course team and the learner?
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