Back into the marking and the academic integrity work

I had said the marking load this semester was quite manageable! And that is true. But that didn’t mean it was quiet when I got back from the Netherlands.

One thing that I had to quickly get back to was my academic integrity cases. I had to try to get these dealt with asap. We need to know by the exam board meetings what the final grades are, so also grades affected by penalties for breach of university regulations. But this was a busy semester for it. So busy that I even managed to deal with two cases in one goal. One student had been flagged up with the same issue in two different assignments within such a short timespan we might as well deal with them in one go. And we did!

I was wondering if we have just reached a moment in time when a large proportion of the students is familiar with AI, and might use it, but that quite a lot of them are not familiar enough with it to make sure they don't end up committing academic malpractice with it. If I'm right then the students will only use it more in coming years, but at least use it better.

But anyway. There wasn't only academic integrity to deal with. Also some managing of other staff. Not everybody had finished their dissertation marking, not everybody had filled out the right forms, not everybody had remembered to give their students a grade for their dissertation journal. And our external examiners were already on the scene; they needed to have access to all this information as well. 

It also turned out to that quite a lot of us had failed to sort out moderation for all assignments. Some of them don't lend themselves to moderation; some are MCQ tests marked by computers, and others are double marked. However; even these need to be moderated. And I had not asked anyone to moderate some of the assessments for which moderation is counterintuitive. And I was told that one of my moderators might have done the moderation, but not filled out the paperwork, so there was no paper trail of it. So more work to do!

In the end, academic integrity was clearly the big issue for me this week. And next week we will have the first exam board meeting. Hopefully it will all have been sorted by then!