I am a lecturer (US equivalent: assistant professor) at a research intensive UK university but also very familiar with the US system where I did my undergraduate studies and some graduate work. I thought it might be useful to give a more detailed look inside the UK system, at least from one department.
Here, exam marking (grading) is done by academic staff rather than postgrads (as xnn already said elsewhere) - and in our department it must be done by the person in charge of the class rather than someone unrelated (we have a lot of team teaching, and I don’t think there are any academics here, even full professors with major grants, who are excused from contributing to teaching). This person is also responsible for designing the exam which goes through a quality control process—must be checked off by another member of academic staff, and then approved by an exam board which goes through question by question to assess how each question relates to the intended learning outcomes of the class, then going to an external exam board who also approve the exam.
We also have independent second marking which is a serious time sink and major bone of contention—marking is not just done by the course convenor, but a second academic independently marks each exam essay and then come to a consensus about the final “agreed” mark. Additionally, one other internal person surveys those marks, particularly for marks just under a grade border, and discusses grading scheme with the first marker if there are problems.
And then, as mentioned the external examiner goes over the exam paper, marking criteria, and a sample of the essays at different levels. And if that were not enough we then have a big meeting with all the parties involved to discuss exam marking issues across the whole degree program.
As you may expect this is an astounding amount of work—the need to assure high quality marking through such heavy efforts is closely related to the typical tendency in many UK institutions to offer no feedback to the students about the details of why they were given a certain mark. Coming from the US this feels very extreme: our students in the UK write essays without notes in in-class examinations and then never see them again, nor indication of why they earned the mark they did. So I very much hesitate to say this is better than the US system where students have access to their exams and thus some amount of accountability is forced by student feedback.
This is incredibly different from the way it’s done at the US and Israel (I’ve taught at Harvard and Hebrew U), where exams are graded by grad-students TA, and certainly no more than one grader each exam.
This leads to a temptation to grading by one’s own own highly informal curve, as well as to extreme grade inflation in top US universities.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK system does not prevent grade inflation for fairly obvious reasons. Whether a full second round of grading happens depends on the department and the class.
As a professor at the University of Rochester in New York (private university) when I taught intro to programming to engineers with ~150 in my class, grading was done by a team of graduate student TAs that I supervised. I wrote the exam, I taught the class, and I supervised the grading giving pretty explicit instructions on each problem how to grade it and grading them all together so questions could be addressed in real time.
Essentially it was me grading the exams, but supervising a team.
The remarkable thing to me was there were no foral checks and balances on either the quality of my teaching or the quality of my grading. This was true the entire 8 years I taught there, and I think is completely typical of US higher education.
I am a lecturer (US equivalent: assistant professor) at a research intensive UK university but also very familiar with the US system where I did my undergraduate studies and some graduate work. I thought it might be useful to give a more detailed look inside the UK system, at least from one department.
Here, exam marking (grading) is done by academic staff rather than postgrads (as xnn already said elsewhere) - and in our department it must be done by the person in charge of the class rather than someone unrelated (we have a lot of team teaching, and I don’t think there are any academics here, even full professors with major grants, who are excused from contributing to teaching). This person is also responsible for designing the exam which goes through a quality control process—must be checked off by another member of academic staff, and then approved by an exam board which goes through question by question to assess how each question relates to the intended learning outcomes of the class, then going to an external exam board who also approve the exam.
We also have independent second marking which is a serious time sink and major bone of contention—marking is not just done by the course convenor, but a second academic independently marks each exam essay and then come to a consensus about the final “agreed” mark. Additionally, one other internal person surveys those marks, particularly for marks just under a grade border, and discusses grading scheme with the first marker if there are problems. And then, as mentioned the external examiner goes over the exam paper, marking criteria, and a sample of the essays at different levels. And if that were not enough we then have a big meeting with all the parties involved to discuss exam marking issues across the whole degree program.
As you may expect this is an astounding amount of work—the need to assure high quality marking through such heavy efforts is closely related to the typical tendency in many UK institutions to offer no feedback to the students about the details of why they were given a certain mark. Coming from the US this feels very extreme: our students in the UK write essays without notes in in-class examinations and then never see them again, nor indication of why they earned the mark they did. So I very much hesitate to say this is better than the US system where students have access to their exams and thus some amount of accountability is forced by student feedback.
Thanks for those details!
This is incredibly different from the way it’s done at the US and Israel (I’ve taught at Harvard and Hebrew U), where exams are graded by grad-students TA, and certainly no more than one grader each exam.
This leads to a temptation to grading by one’s own own highly informal curve, as well as to extreme grade inflation in top US universities.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK system does not prevent grade inflation for fairly obvious reasons. Whether a full second round of grading happens depends on the department and the class.
As a professor at the University of Rochester in New York (private university) when I taught intro to programming to engineers with ~150 in my class, grading was done by a team of graduate student TAs that I supervised. I wrote the exam, I taught the class, and I supervised the grading giving pretty explicit instructions on each problem how to grade it and grading them all together so questions could be addressed in real time.
Essentially it was me grading the exams, but supervising a team.
The remarkable thing to me was there were no foral checks and balances on either the quality of my teaching or the quality of my grading. This was true the entire 8 years I taught there, and I think is completely typical of US higher education.