This morning we had the final examiners meeting in my department for the award of this year's undergraduate degrees.  As I had convened and taught a module in the first semester I was required to attend (as a result of the rules on attendance that I had written in my PVC role!).  The exam board was also an area where my actions as PVC and my departmental exam board intersected. I am thinking of the role of external examiners.

Our external examiners this year have been two excellent senior colleagues from research-intensive universities, and the advice they have given the department has been outstanding.  They both complimented us on the rigour of our marking procedures, on the tightness of our moderation and second marking systems, and on the consistency of our evaluations of student performance. But then they went on to give us some very broad brush views of our overall work as university educators.  One of our externals provided an extended analysis of the degree class outcomes of our deliberations, contrasting the Sheffield position with that of all other geography departments around the UK, and of those in Russell Group universities in particular.  His analysis brought in other variables such as entry standards, and left us with some very thought-provoking material for future reflection.

The second external reflected on our overall course structure, on the way the curriculum is constructed, on the role of field teaching within it, on aspects of disciplinary progression - particularly between the second and third years, and on the reduction in the presence of what used at one time to be one of the core areas of the discipline.  In doing so he provided a big picture view of our degree and created an agenda for future discussion.  Certain observations he made last year on our level 2 credit and assessment structures provided the catalyst to almost immediate revision on our part.

So our external examiners have commented usefully on our curricula, the intellectual progression within our programmes, and on our standards.

Casting my mind back a few years, I remember the time when all external examiners did was to spend their time adjudicating marginal marks on scripts and interviewing frightened students in the attempt to discern whether individuals had enough of that undefined quality that could tip them over the line from a third to a lower second, or from an upper second to a first (very rare at the time, since we had never specified what we were looking for in a first and very few students ever helped us to crystallise our thinking as exemplars and thus obtain the highest grade).  And I always noticed in those viva voce  examinations that it was the more orally articulate students that did well rather than those who had ability (and for one external of years back it also helped if they were pretty women).

Over the last two decades we have seen a shift in the work of external examiners - from adjudicators on individual cases, to critical friends for departments.  It is a shift that I hugely welcome - and one which I feel does a great deal to maintain the quality and standards of our degrees.  At the same time we have come up with much clearer definitions for students of what it is we are looking for from them. We have introduced robust marking procedures alongside these well-stated criteria.  We have moved to fully anonymous marking and degree awarding.  And we have moved to a more mechanistic system for the decision on degree classes - which can still allow for discretion in unusual cases (we had two such today, where the final agreed award was not the prima facie one suggested by the marks, but was affected by an unusual trajectory or by special circumstances).

But I recognise that people will expect me to defend our new degree classification system and the mechanistic approach it brings, since I was the principal author of it, and even after all the adjustments as we brought it in it still bears a strong resemblance to the jottings I put down on a few scraps of paper as I waited for a delayed plane out of Catania airport in September 2004.  I know there are parts of the university where they would still prefer external examiners' primary roles to be the making of ex cathedra statements of adjudication on individual students, rather than the taking of a broad overview.  I look forward to the comments to be added to this blog.