Ensuring equality across candidates
There do not appear to be any central guidelines for HE relating to the moderation of oral examinations to ensure equality of treatment. Having two examiners is the most sensible approach to avoid over-reliance on a single subjective voice, but even in this case, if in a large department there are several teams of examiners, steps will still need to be taken to ensure parity across teams. A moderator going from room to room, checking the way that marking is being done, in discussion with the examiners after having listened in on one or two candidates is one method. This method can also be used if it is only possible to have a single examiner.
It should be remembered that such moderation has to be done early in the day, before too many examinations have taken place. It is always sensible to record oral examinations counting towards final degrees, to have something to refer back to in the case of query or appeal. Here are the comments of a languages department examinations officer on the subject of moderation, explaining some of the difficulties which are increasingly faced:
| Generally speaking we need increasingly to be able to demonstrate that we are scrutinizing moderation properly. We have had one appeal over an oral exam, which is what encouraged us to introduce recordings the following year. What we had to do the year of the appeal was to rely on notes from examiners, which weren't very informative. The appeal was not allowed in the end but the oral mark did make a crucial difference so it was a bit awkward. The only safeguard we had at the time was the fact that externals were moving between panels so effectively standardizing them. |
The best approach of all, whatever the number of examiners, is to have clear marking guidelines so as to reduce the margin for error and the risk of discrepancies between examiners. Use marksheets of the kind given as examples in Appendix 4, and in the previous section (6.6.4.2). A meeting of all examiners involved should be held in advance of the examination, to work through the guidelines and discuss their interpretation. In addition an expanded version of each mark sheet, containing explanatory notes for each section (such as those in the mark sheet in section 6.6.4.2.) could be distributed to each examiner. For further reading on ensuring equality see Underhill (1987: 88-103).
