Last exam board meeting

After the marking is done, we have to go through the results. Is everything ok? Are there strange trends of grades rising or falling? Are there outliers caused by unusual circumstances? Should these be corrected? Is there nothing going wrong with big gender differences in grades, or differences between students on different degree programs? 

One of the sort of graphs we would be looking at

We tend to have the first exam board meeting internally, dealing with the students about to graduate. We go through all their modules. The second meeting then is with our external examiners. They have gone through everything as well, with a fresh view on things. They may ask us all sorts of things we haven't really thought about. Or a notice that we are inconsistent in some ways. Or anything, really.

After that is all done we done deal with the students who are not graduating. It's the same process, really; it's just that we get these students back the year after.

This year there was a bit of a spanner in the works; a very important server on main campus has gone down, so nobody had access to the data we were supposed to be discussing. We had the first exam board meeting of the week shortly after the server had come online again, and the second and last one on a morning in which it had broken down again. Not ideal! But somehow, we made it work.

With the last exam board meeting done, I suppose the year is really over! And then the next thing of note that happens is graduation…