External Examiners»

External Examiners

  • Institutions should state clearly and communicate to all concerned the various the roles, powers and responsibilities assigned to their CCL external examiners.

        • By providing clear guidance on the role and authority of different types of examiner within their assessment systems, institutions will help all parties concerned with the assessment process, including students, examiners, academic departments/schools and individual academic staff, to understand:

        • the responsibilities of a subject examiner within a modular system, who might normally be asked to comment on assessment practices at module or element level;

        • the role of an external examiner of a programme or group of programmes, normally in one or few subject areas, whose expertise may need to include a knowledge of good practice in assessment within a modular or unitised system;

        • the role of a senior examiner whose remit might be to advise on comparability of the examining process across a range of programmes, such as procedures for classification of degrees.

        • A clear understanding by external examiners of the ways in which their work underpins the institution's quality assurance processes will help them to fulfil their role effectively.

        • To enable external examiners to fulfill their moderating role, they would normally be expected to attend examination/assessment boards, either at programme or module/course/unit level.

        • The extent to which the external examiner may influence the final decision of the board is a matter for institutional policy.

        • Institutions will have their own procedures for enabling external examiners to endorse assessment outcomes. They normally provide specific guidance both on the significance of external examiners' signatures on documents recording the final decisions of examination boards and on the arrangements for resolving a situation where an external examiner is unwilling to endorse the outcomes of the assessment processes.