Supplementary Assessment Week (fortnight)

Most students make it without difficulty into the next year, or, if they are in their final year, their graduation. But not all. And those generally get the opportunity to redeem some low grades in summer. Originally, we had Supplementary Assessment Week (SAW) in July. Some students were allowed to just resit an assessment they had missed (first sits), maybe because they were ill, and some students were doing assessments that represented entire modules (supplementary assessment), in order to improve on their module grades. SAW is by now a bit of a misnomer as the period lasts two weeks, but the principle is the same.

The first thing that happens is that after the exam board meetings you get a message from the Assessment Officer or the Senior Tutor or someone along those lines, that you have to get all these assessments ready. All my modules had them. Quite often, you have to prepare for both first sits and supplementary assessments. It's more work than you might think!

More work comes, of course, when the students have submitted. Then it all needs to be marked really quickly. Sometimes that is problematic as teaching staff are on holiday. This is the middle of July, after all!

I had quite a lot, but not everything in my modules had to be marked by me. I have, of course, the dissertation module, with all the third year student in it. There were quite a lot of them entitled to submit something during SAW; 16 pieces of work in total. But if that was a first sit, then the people originally designated to supervise or second-mark that were supposed to take care of that. The supplementary assessments were mine. And, by complete coincidence, there were three first sit dissertations submitted, and I had to second-mark two of them.

The supplementary assessment for the dissertation module involves sea ice

 

I also have to deal with any cases of breach of academic integrity regulations, of course. Luckily, there weren't many of those, but more than zero. Ending up in my spreadsheet of AI cases during SAW is not a good sign. But standards need to be upheld!

In the week after SAW, so when all the marking took place, I practically did not make any progress on my Senior Fellowship application. In this way, someone quickly runs away! Autumn always comes too fast. And I haven't even had holiday yet. I'll have to try to be efficient with the rest of my summer!