On 20 April 2023, in the context of a years-long dispute on pensions, pay, and working conditions, academic staff across the UK started a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) called by the University and College Union (UCU). The MAB lasted until September 2023, directly impacting assessment culminating in the May and August exam diets. As often is the way when systems ‘breakdown’ or suddenly require large-scale workarounds, a huge amount of learning and reflection emerges. In this post, we draw on our experience and reflections of the MAB as an entry point to unpick how regulatory ‘academic standards’ influence our assessment and feedback practices. We argue that a focus on pedagogically-informed course and programme design, where marks are dissociated from feedback, would be more beneficial to students’ learning than a focus on an aggregated numerical grade. Background to the MAB and academic standards in relation to assessment and feedback In our University, assessment is regulated by each School’s Boards of Examiners according to the Taught Assessment Regulations, which in turn are decided by the Senate’s Academic Policy and Regulations Committee. Edinburgh saw strong participation in the MAB, prompting Senate to change the regulations temporarily in order to “mitigate against the impact of significant disruption to students, without compromising academic standards” [1]. Boards of Examiners were asked to make an academic judgement on whether they had sufficient information on students’ performance to decide on progression or degree awards; to what extent was the Board confident that a student had achieved learning outcomes and was ready to progress or graduate? Our proxy for this decision is usually an average of numerical marks. With many of these unavailable due to the MAB, many Boards of Examiners decided that they were not competent to make an informed decision, leading to a large number of students affected by delayed results despite the relaxed regulations – including 30% of students [2] graduating in July either without an award, or with an unclassified degree. Although the immediate impact on students was regrettable, this cautious approach likely contributed favourably to the very small number of misclassifications [3]. Even under a narrow understanding of “academic standards” defined by graduates obtaining the appropriate degree classification, it is difficult to see how Boards applying the full extent of available mitigations would have maintained academic standards. Perspectives on academic standards Often, and certainly in the context of the MAB, the institutional understanding of “academic standards” is about the regulatory framework of Quality Assurance, an interlocking system of regulations set by Scottish ministers (through the Quality Assurance Agency), the University’s regulations, and each School’s Board of Examiners. The “quality” in question relates to the quantitative outcomes produced by Boards of Examiners (a course mark, a progression decision, a degree classification). Quality Assurance is how institutions demonstrate robustness and reliability of those outcomes to external stakeholders. In the process, all the learning and growth a student has experienced are distilled into one final grade. This is an administrative process, happening after all learning and assessment are complete; by necessity, it’s based on shortcuts. For example, the 40% grade boundary provides a standardised threshold over which a student is deemed to have passed a course. This saves Boards of Examiners from having to wrestle with its implications: are we passing students who have achieved 2 out of 5 learning outcomes? Are we contenting ourselves with “achievement” being defined as 40% of the best possible performance? In contrast, from an educator’s perspective, that is perhaps more internal facing, “academic standards” is understood as starting with rigorous, pedagogically-informed course and assessment design, and includes everything that happens before the final grade. In this sense, academic standards are standards we set on students’ engagement, learning, and growth, and on ourselves as instructors. We design assessment to give students the opportunity to demonstrate their progress; to give us confidence that they are ready for the next stage. Regulatory mitigations only introduced more possible shortcuts for Boards of Examiners to produce aggregated outcomes with limited information from courses. Clearly, this cannot fit with educators’ understanding of “maintaining academic standards” – by definition, we did not have sufficient information to assess whether they were maintained. These different understandings of “academic standards” explain how academic staff who raised concerns about mitigations were left unsatisfied by the University’s response, and particularly concerned about continuing students [4]. Indeed, the major concern to UCEA [5] was primarily the disruption to the administrative function of exam boards, rather than, say, the delay of feedback on coursework, or the impact on student learning [6]. Returning to the Feedback and Assessment Principles and Priorities Perhaps we can better understand the relevant assumptions about marks and feedback by considering the University’s Feedback and Assessment Principles and Priorities. None of these refer to marks or grades, although an educator’s perspective might be that these all contribute to upholding robust academic standards:
