Ensuring Fair Assessment

All courses at Sheffield Hallam University are subject to the University's quality assurance processes which begin when courses are designed and approved.  An important element in this is the input of external partners and professional bodies with subject expertise that inform course design.  Subject experts from other Universities also act external examiners on our courses to ensure your course standards are comparable with other Universities.  Our current external examiner is from Swansea University.

Each year, all assessment tasks are reviewed by staff before they are released to students.  This ensures they are appropriate and suitable for testing the learning outcomes agreed during course approval.  The assessment(s) will be set by the Module Leader and/or module team subject to approval by both an internal moderator and, if the marks from the assessment contribute to your award classification, an external examiner. This will normally take place before they are given to you at the start of teaching.

When you submit your work for marking it will be marked against a marking grid. You will have had access to these criteria in preparation for your submission. To enhance consistency of marking the university requires all marking teams to undertake a marking standardisation exercise. The aim of this exercise is to ensure that the markers have a consistent view of the criteria and are applying it fairly and equitably during the marking process. A statement will be made in the module handbook on how the standardisation exercise takes place.

Once all the submissions for the module have been marked, they will then be moderated. This means that an independent team of academics will review the marks against the criteria for fairness and equity. They will look at a representative sample (a script from each award band and each marker) of marked submissions and report on their findings.

A further sample of submitted work is then reviewed by an External Examiner, who is an academic from another university. They will be assessed and provide comments on the marking and feedback for equity and fairness. They will draw on their experience from their own university to ensure that our marking and moderation is consistent with the national expectations.   The External examiner's feedback is considered at the Departmental Assessment Board, where results are finally ratified.

The purpose of these quality assurance processes is to ensure that no student is disadvantaged by our assessment practices, to ensure that our assessments allow all students to meet the learning outcomes of their modules to the best of their abilities, and to ensure that standards of marking and feedback are entirely appropriate and fair to all.

On each group organisation site on Blackboard, there is a presentation on how we mark and moderate your work.  This helps to give clarity to how this task is undertaken and includes guidance on marking turnaround times for feedback and release of marks.