External examiners and course (or student) representatives share many things, but perhaps the most surprising is the sector’s repeated calls to bin them off.
Whether it’s external examining’s absence from OfS’ first attempts at cementing its conditions of regulation, or the repeated sector reviews of external examiner arrangements, or even my past-self debating what next for course reps on the site, both have taken their fair share of sector flak.
But after a bit of soul-searching (and a new role) what I’ve become interested in is not so much the wider discussion of whether peer-to-peer and/or external feedback is valuable for the sector (it is), but the mechanism with which it is delivered – and whether we can learn and apply what we do with external examiners to help support the integration of meaningful student voice to QA processes.
Nuts and bolts
The minutiae of how external examiners operate across institutions may differ, but the fundamentals tend to remain the same.
